Hello
I played around with blender yesterday and came up with this face wich I made a simple animation on.
The movies is in divx 6:
Happy Blendering
t3d
Hey man. Long time since last. The animation looks great and the head as well. Nice to hear from you.
Its a good start but I wouldn’t say its finished. The movement is way too uniform. I think you need some acceleration and deceleration of the movement (I think you can do this with IPO curves). Remember a movement usually isn’t uniform but has a speed up, and a slow down and usually has a little bit of a recoil when it stops since an object motion tends to want to stay in motion. Hope this helps.
Thanks for the tip. 
This was far away from a serious attempt to make a realy impressiv animation. The main thing with this was the modeling part. Trying to get a model to deform nicely when being animated. So this modell is completely made up with four sided faces, not a single tri and edgeloops that flows nicely through the mesh.
But if you got some more tip on animation - that’s great, it’s always appreciated. Oh I have a question: What’s the best way to rig a head? Where to put bones ( jaw ! , lips? ) and where to use RVKs?
t3d
I am trying to figure that as well. I would think for the jaw you would need just one bone for the lower jaw. The upper jaw doesn’t move on people its fixed into the upper skull. I think pretty much all fine lip movement woudl be best done with RVK’s, and large movements using the jaw. I don’t think you have to rig the nose, you could set up a few RVK’s for a nose wiggle. I think eyebrows could be rigged with either RVK’s or bones. I also heard that hooks work really well, but I’m not sure how to use those. I am learning facial animation as well, my fish project is pretty much just a giant face with fins and a tail.
Yeah, I think you are right about the jaw. But you also need a RVK for the mouth that make it less wide when the jaw is fully opened. Otherwise you will end up with a huge mouth, that dosn’t look realistic.
One part that probably should be animated with bones is the eyelids. They have to follow the roundnes of the eyeball to look nice. RVKs are a linear motion between two points and could therefore not be used in that case.
I will test some rigging on my model to see what looks best (if I get time :-? ).
Rvk’s on eyelids work extremely well, and you just need to be savy about your shapes. Bones would probably take longer to set up properly, I think you would need constraints of movements so the eyelids dont’ go into each other.
Not really. Just animate it once correctly and set it as an action. Then reuse it whenever you need it.
Not really. Just animate it once correctly and set it as an action. Then reuse it whenever you need it.[/quote]
How do you set an animation as an action for bones? Can this be slider controlled?
Using the action editor and the NLA. And with the new IPO drivers, something very similar (maybe better) than sliders is possible.