Sad????

[Ricky40]

Anyone know how to take a "sad" pic with your avatar? I saw some poses on MP but your face stays the same. Is there a way to make it look like your av is sad or even crying?

[Orwar]

   You'll need an animation that also animates the face, or a facial animation to go with the pose (some heads come with different expressions in their HUDs). For the face to be animated you need to be using a bento head. There are some tears and such around on the market, too.

[Love Zhaoying]

There are actually a couple "internal" Second Life animations for emotions, see"EXPRESS_*":

https://wiki.secondlife.com/wiki/Internal_Animations

[ValKalAstra]

I find capturing emotions in SL to be particularly difficult. It's a lot of very subtle muscle movement that's hard to catch with the limited amount of animation bones we've got. You may need to compensate by trying additional expressive aspects. For example, using cold (blue) light with stark shadows that hide the eyes. Body posture can do a lot of heavy lifting, as can do overall lighting and direction.

Here's an unedited example of one of my recent pictures. Unedited because I would feel cheeky double posting the end result. Let me walk through my thought processes for it. First, a small cutout from the unedited shot:

If you look at the face, it has got barely any expression on it. The head is inclined towards a shoulder and the gaze is cast down, both of which can convey a sense of inwardness or introspection. More or less, like I was in my own thoughts. Overall body language protects the chest with the arms, something we do when we feel vulnerable. Same reason we fold our arms when we get into an argument - we instinctively protect our most vulnerable body parts (read, organs). Sadness is a very vulnerable emotion and so I thought it would work well to cross the arms and then have the hands reach out to the shoulders as if I was trying to hug myself for comfort. Sadness is also often an emotion described as cold and we tend to wrap our arms around ourselves when cold too.

Further on, the lighting. There's a contrast between warm light coming from the side and most of the body being cast in shadow. This was meant to create a dichotomy between the warmth outside and the cold inside, almost like these two things don't belong together. Last but not least, I'm turned away from the warmth of the light. Body language is showing a "cold" shoulder towards it.

And perhaps in a lucky coincident, the sparkles I forgot to remove kind of added two little glitters on my cheek that might be tears. Happy little accidents, eh Bob Ross? Still what I want to get at: The face shows barely any emotion. It's the same type of boring model/mannequin stare we're all so familiar with. Bodypose, light, mood and scene composition do the heavy lifting to convey the sadness. I hope it worked but at least that was the intent!

Hope this helped a bit.

Oh, yah. I did use the Lelutka Axis Hud to move the head and eyes. I can't recommend it enough, it's part of every shot I take.

[Ayashe Ninetails]

I do this from time to time using a combination of built-in face AOs (for that, you'll need a rather expressive head with a good range of facial animations), a separate face mood/expression HUD (I use the Happy Dispatch Bento Facial Expression HUD) to pose the eyes and mouth separately, and for fine tuning of features, I use the built-in pose tools in Black Dragon. I don't edit anything outside of SL.

For tears, I just work with my head's materials to increase wet and shine. I also use smudged makeup on occasion. Eye choice also makes a huge difference. I pick a set with a lot of shine and reflection, and with some (most?) heads, you can tweak your eye materials to add more/less gloss and tinker with other options as well. Catwa's heads are pretty good at the whole teary-eyed thing. I've also gotten good results with Akeruka when I'm working with a more plastic doll-like avatar as I think AK's eyes can often hit that "faraway stare" I sometimes go for (last two photos below) with the right amount of fiddling.

Lastly - I play with the setting, lighting, shadows, poses, props, mood, etc. This helps especially if my face isn't fully visible for whatever reason.

Edit: I'll also add that there are some eye effect layers you could buy - puffy eyes, dark circles, tears, etc. I don't typically go that far, though. Here's a tear set by Izzie's, for example - https://marketplace.secondlife.com/p/Izzies-Tears-Evo-X/25755214 . That could be combined with their other BOM effects like "flu face" or "hangover face" and things like that, if you really wanted to get into it. Other stores sell other options, too. Jack Spoon might, for example.

 

Some results of putting all that together:

 

 

 

 

Edited March 17 by Ayashe Ninetails
Added stuffs

[Ricky40]

6 hours ago, ValKalAstra said:

I find capturing emotions in SL to be particularly difficult. It's a lot of very subtle muscle movement that's hard to catch with the limited amount of animation bones we've got. You may need to compensate by trying additional expressive aspects. For example, using cold (blue) light with stark shadows that hide the eyes. Body posture can do a lot of heavy lifting, as can do overall lighting and direction.

Here's an unedited example of one of my recent pictures. Unedited because I would feel cheeky double posting the end result. Let me walk through my thought processes for it. First, a small cutout from the unedited shot:

If you look at the face, it has got barely any expression on it. The head is inclined towards a shoulder and the gaze is cast down, both of which can convey a sense of inwardness or introspection. More or less, like I was in my own thoughts. Overall body language protects the chest with the arms, something we do when we feel vulnerable. Same reason we fold our arms when we get into an argument - we instinctively protect our most vulnerable body parts (read, organs). Sadness is a very vulnerable emotion and so I thought it would work well to cross the arms and then have the hands reach out to the shoulders as if I was trying to hug myself for comfort. Sadness is also often an emotion described as cold and we tend to wrap our arms around ourselves when cold too.

Further on, the lighting. There's a contrast between warm light coming from the side and most of the body being cast in shadow. This was meant to create a dichotomy between the warmth outside and the cold inside, almost like these two things don't belong together. Last but not least, I'm turned away from the warmth of the light. Body language is showing a "cold" shoulder towards it.

And perhaps in a lucky coincident, the sparkles I forgot to remove kind of added two little glitters on my cheek that might be tears. Happy little accidents, eh Bob Ross? Still what I want to get at: The face shows barely any emotion. It's the same type of boring model/mannequin stare we're all so familiar with. Bodypose, light, mood and scene composition do the heavy lifting to convey the sadness. I hope it worked but at least that was the intent!

Hope this helped a bit.

Oh, yah. I did use the Lelutka Axis Hud to move the head and eyes. I can't recommend it enough, it's part of every shot I take.

wow! you are amazing, i hope you have a flicr page

[Conifer Dada]

If you're able to use the standard SL facial expressions, it's useful to set animation to slow motion, which gives you the opportunity to capture the expression before it reaches its full extent, to give a more subtle effect. Presumably the slow motion trick would work with Bento too.

[Ceka Cianci]

You could use Lelutkas Axis hud, which is nice for making expressions for pictures..

I didn't really do too much in these other than a slight pout in the eyes.. I had an idea of ,Waiting for someone to come home that should have been home hours ago.

It has a pretty good range in expressions..

 

[taisiyakarpenko]

+1 for the LeLutka Axis HUD - I use it in almost all pictures I take. If I'm after a truly specific (more advanced) look, I might have to refine the expression with the Poser in Black dragon - but for 90% of what I do, I get by with Axis only...

 

[CaitlinParker]

Mine comes from a brow deformer and the worried look on the Catwa HUD.

[Nalates Urriah]

@Ricky40 Ayashe gave a good set of examples, above, of what can be done with Black Dragon's Poser.

I often start with a facial animation/pose HUD that gets close to what I want then tweak the expression in BD.

Not all heads are equal when if comes to using BD's Poser. With my Jennifer head by GA.ER I can't move teeth and other parts of the face as independently as I would like. But I do have good lip and eye control with this head.

[Manu Mysterious]

On 3/17/2024 at 3:22 AM, Ricky40 said:

Anyone know how to take a "sad" pic with your avatar? I saw some poses on MP but your face stays the same. Is there a way to make it look like your av is sad or even crying?

Sure, there are some face anims like this for e.g.. You can find also some animated mesh tears or you can use a Tears BOM layer over your face....depends on what you like. 

[CaitlinParker]

Usually, it's just subtle differences to the face that can make it work.