Hi.
My last foray into character creation resulted in learning a few things and set me on a path of rigging and animation, which wasn’t part of a plan as I’m not even trying to become an animator or a character artist. But since I heard that trying new things is good for you - here I am. It was either animation or cocaine.
So I wondered if I can get visible wrinkles on a face during it’s deformation, based on bone influence/movement. As I understand I would require this addon.
Here’s a conveniently bald model I’ll be using to avoid doing any hair simulation, as it didn’t go very smoothly the last time I tried it.
I don’t plan on this to become a proper portfolio piece or get some pretty renders out of it, this is just a test of what one could make with minimum amount of effort.
So I guess the next bit is to rig it. I’ll be using Rigify as it’s the only rigging tool I know.
After that, I’ll compile a list of wrinkles that need to be sculpted for red/green channels of tension map.
Thanks, I’ve skimmed through it the other day and most of it is too complex for me.
Plus, he seems to be doing it via displacement textures driven by masks (that are also driven by tension maps?).
I plan to just use regular normal maps, controlled by dynamic vertex colours.
I did, however, save this for future reference.
Meanwhile I rigged the face (the best I could) and posed it in two exaggerated states for wrinkle sculpting.
These are the areas I figured need wrinkles:
Red (“surprised”): forehead, lips and around mouth, chin folds, upper eyelid stretch
Green (“angry”): furled brow and nose, nasolabial fold, mouth corners, lower eyelid, crow’s feet, cheek folds (dimples?).
I ended up sculpting 4 busts instead of 2 (middle one is just a backside of the last one), so I’m gonna mix those 4 normal maps down to 2.
The only reason I did four is for better readability of wrinkles when sculpting. The faster and more reasonable way is still to do 2 and call it a day.
Can’t get Bluefox addon to install for whatever reason, so would have to stick with the first one. Will try both later on with a fresh blender install to avoid any errors.
I have to say, “Revised mesh tension add-on” can’t be used for real time previewing. So finding alternative is a must (provided it’s faster).
I had to crank the strength of tension map to 25, as well as increase iterations to 1, which makes real time previewing impossible. Bias had to be set to -0.15 as Red (compression) vertices were almost nonexistent.
And all of that with a amateurish exaggerated animation. I can’t really imagine it working well with normal movement, at least without lots of tweaking.
I did some basic mo cap test to the best of my abilities:
Cycles (raw trackers), Eevee (cleaned, with corrections), wireframe.
I couldn’t find a comprehensive guide on how to connect Rigify bones to trackers from video so I did everything hillbilly-style via proxies parented to trackers and then aligned to the rig itself. Then added individual bone constraints (to follow proxies). I’m hope there’s an easier way of doing old school mocap with trackers in blender, because this was extremely tedious and disappointing.
The other solution would be to look into a DIY mocap set up or get a pre made product, but I’m not sure there is one that works out of the box with rigify, as it’s my rig of choice (being the most universal and easy for noobs in animation like me).
I think it’s safe to call this test project ‘done’
