Animating Facial Features & Expressions, 2/e

Description

This is a great reference book for all animators focused on creating talking and emotionally expressive characters. For anyone not already actively doing this kind of work, like students, it will help to set expectations for what the standard for acceptable quality is in today’s market.”
      — Tito Pagan, Digipen Institute of Technology

This completely updated edition of the classic Animating Facial Features & Expressions brings this resource up to date with today’s tools and techniques. Written to teach 3D artists, designers, and animators how to add realism to their character’s expressions, this is a one-of- a-kind reference you’ll want to add to your library.

The book begins by teaching you about the anatomy of the human head, facial features, and facial muscles. From there it teaches you how to recreate the human face and muscle structure in 3D and then how to make it move in realistic, believable fashion. The book is filled with detailed instruction for lip synching and creating visual expressions for speech and sound under a variety of conditions (sad, happy, stuttering, etc.). It provides visual reference charts of morph targets for weighted human expressions, typical human phonemes, cartoon expressions, facial expressions, and just-for-fun cartoon expressions. In this edition there are also two new chapters that teach you how to use 3ds Max and Maya for animating facial expressions. All of these techniques can be applied to your own game characters, animals, creatures, and other animated creations.

If you want your characters to have truly realistic facial expressions, you’ll learn everything you need to know in this indispensable resource.

 

• Provides 3D designers and animators with a detailed reference for creating realistic facial expressions
• Includes completely updated coverage of the latest tools and techniques
• Includes two new chapters: Animating Facial Expressions with 3ds Max, and Animating Facial Expressions with Maya
• Provides new coverage of facial expressions animated with Bones, and Expressions using Joints, Clusters, and Spline IK