Newb question about animating a mesh head

[Giselle Novo]

I hope this is the right forum for this question:)

Sorry for my newbness, But im creating a human mesh avatar. But id like the eyes to blink, have facial expressions and mouth to move when typing and voice talking if possible. the head will be all mesh no seperate parts.

Anyone have any ideas? Or can point me to the locations that help? Also i have avastar.

thx in advance!

[Cathy Foil]

You are kinda seeking the Holly Grail of mesh heads unfortunately.  Lots of people have been trying all using multiple mesh or multiple materials using alphas and textures to hide or show different parts of the face with some small success.

But as far as what you are looking for no one as far as I know has succeeded.  Only way I can think of trying to come close would be to have a mesh head that has no mouth and use animated textures to give the illusion of the mouth opening and closing.  Of course from the side the missing mouth geometry would be noticeable.

As far as the eyes blinking that could either also be done with the animated texture or just have the head alpha that makes most of your real avatar's head invisible but not make the eye area of the head invisible so the skin textures around the real avatar's head is visible.

It is really a shame that LL rejected the Mesh Deformer.  Hopefully the new CEO will realize how beneficial to SL it would be to have the Mesh Deformer.  It can work right along side Fitted Mesh because they work completely different from each other so there is no reason SL can't have both.

Anyway here is a video I made some months back showing a quick mesh head I made that uses the Mesh Deformer.  You will notice that the eyes blink and all the Editing Appearance sliders work on the head as well.  You won't really see any facial expressions though I know they work because I seen them work and because if the Editing Appearance sliders work that means when the real avatars face moves making an expression the custom mesh head face would also move.

Hope that helps.
Cathy

[Giselle Novo]

thx so much for that helpful video! i really appreciate it.

Im looking to make my mesh heads, snow rabbits mesh head. how they blink and mouth moves occationally. Do you happen to know the process for this? i cant wrap my brain around where to start.

 

thx:)

[Cathy Foil]

From what I understand Snow Rabbit's mesh heads are not without their own problems.  I believe Snow's heads use a series of mesh layers stacked on top of each other for the mouth.  The the bottom layer is probably with the mouth opened to it's maximum.  The middle layer is probably with the mouth half closed and the top most layer with the mouth fully closed.

Each one of these layers would be its own materiel so with a script you can change the alpha setting to slowly have it fade to 100% invisible revealing the layer beneath and then the next lower layer would then also start to go to 100% alpha and so on till the mouth was fully open.

The problem with stacking alpha textures and materials in such a way is you can get some strange flickering which ruins the effect.  One way to combat this is to have all the textures of the head be set on Full Bright and or wear a bright face light.  This is fine during daytime but at night it is less than ideal.

From the few videos I watched the expressions are rather random and probably don't respond to typing or if you use your voice.

I do think Rabbit's mesh heads are very beautiful and are probably my favorites esthetically though a bit too child like for my personal preference to wear as an avatar.

[Medhue Simoni]

Using Avastar in Blender, allowed me to rig the lower jaw of my Lycan avatar to the m_skull bone. So, my Lycan has a perfectly working jaw, and I weighted the eyebrows to the skull bone also, just a little, to make him look like he is mad when his jaw is open wide. I had to export the jaw animation in the anim file option, as that format includes the m_skull bone. My Lycan can talk when you type, and I made speech gestures for him, so his jaw will move when you talk.

His eyes are rigged to the eye bones, and they will move just like the SL avatar eyes will. I added a eyelid mesh to Lycan's eyes, so I could use a alpha change script to make the eyelid mesh transparent when it should be.

 

What I think LL should do, is scrap both the mesh deformer, and especially the Fitted mesh, and then allow us to import morphs. The DAE format allows for morphing data. We wouldn't even need custom bones, if LL just implemented morphs, as you can morph a mesh to move just like a bone does.