Liquify was used to add expression to the neutral facial pose which I feature-extracted from my FaceGen model.*
Notes:
(1) FaceGen does emotion modeling, but it wasn't giving me what I needed.
(2) The Liquify filter is only a Photoshop filter (for bitmap images only). It is NOT magic. You still must apply skill and patience to progressively work towards a convincing expression. But Liquify really helps.
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* As I mentioned previously, the most valuable aspect of FaceGen is its ability to help you visualize a face turned to extreme rotations. (This is the first frame of a head turning up from the horizontal plane.)
My artistic skills are finally improving, so I am replacing the lame animated GIF I put here with another before and after example of PhotoShop Liquify. See the next post.
I suppose this example doesn't involve anything new, but it's a much better drawing!
I'm sharing this because I think many of you could benefit from using this tool in the bitmap domain, before you go to the next stage of vector animation . . .
You can actually do many (if not all) of the same things with the magnet tool for vector art in AS.
There was an example somewhere of someone using this to create a head turn -- they had the frontal view and then used the magnet to slide the features around to the side. It was actually very convincing (couldn't work for my work flow for a whole bunch of reasons).
The concepts for both are the same -- in one case you're pushing pixels and the other you're pushing control points but the workflow acts the same way (and it feels the same).
I don't feel enough people use the magnet tool in AS -- very powerful (I use it a lot to create variations on duplicated shapes like trees).
mkelley wrote:You can actually do many (if not all) of the same things with the magnet tool for vector art in AS.
There was an example somewhere of someone using this to create a head turn -- they had the frontal view and then used the magnet to slide the features around to the side. It was actually very convincing (couldn't work for my work flow for a whole bunch of reasons).
The concepts for both are the same -- in one case you're pushing pixels and the other you're pushing control points but the workflow acts the same way (and it feels the same).
I don't feel enough people use the magnet tool in AS -- very powerful (I use it a lot to create variations on duplicated shapes like trees).
I'd like to find a simple example of this magnet technique. It doesn't sound too convincing, but I've never seen it done. There's a link to a tutorial for it somewhere in thr forum, but it's a dead link.
I messed around a little with the idea, but was never able to get it to work.
The magnet part of the equation was just that -- just the use of the magnet to push around some of the features. The main part of the tutorial was really the use of actions, if I remember right (the guy used actions to control the various movements of the head as it rotated) and to hide and unhide the ears. I actually learned more about using actions then I did about the magnet tool.
The magnet works because if you adjust it right when you shove the eyes and nose and mouth over with it it compresses them the same way they get foreshortened as the head rotates. As the original poster of this topic noted, using such a feature isn't automatic and requires some artistic skill. Just like there is no "automatic" way to create expressions, so there is no automatic way to get the features to "squash" properly. But it's a useful approach to the problem. You still would have to shape the head and hair properly.
It's too bad that link is dead because when I saw the video I had one of those "aha" moments where I actually saw the magnet tool as useful. And, as I said, I've been able to use it subsequently for many things. It seems to me I did download that, and if so I could email it to you (but I wouldn't feel right in hosting it somewhere -- it don't belong to me :>)
