My problem is simple :
I am using Face tracking Motion Capture to retarget my face motion on a Rigify rig (BlenderARtrack)
The data transfer is working well, but even if I do big mouth movements, exagerated expressions, the final movement on cartoon characters keep being disappointing as lips moves are very little and eyes are not that much reacting also…
The movement base is good, so what I would need is something that permit to make the movement “bigger”, like exagerating it on the final controllers, to fit well a cartoonish face. Like having a simple way to have the same action, but 70% exagerated. Do you have an idea of how to achieve this?
I think that most people would create corrective shapekeys and sculpt them.
If final result can be achieved by posing rig bones, you probably can mix a manual animation as an NLA action strip with animation from capture as another one.
Thanks, yeah i tought about shape keys or even adding a bone and parent it to the controller with child of to fix the movement but I feel this is kind of the “hard way” to do it as this is manual and will ask to manually fix every mocaps i’ll create on cartoonish characters.
In case there is some trix to “exagerate” the action of the bone & controller (like a bone move on the Z axis, an easy way to make his motion be the exact same but 70% stronger) i would be glad to know it.
There are few chances that an automatic solution looks right.
But you can add an Envelope modifier to all f-curves of animation in Graph Editor (add a modifier to one, copy it and paste it to all the others selected in one action).
That does not mean that final animation will look coherent.
Yes you need always to use shape keys for extra deformations and especially exaggerated poses that the bone itself cannot do due to its limited motion. And yes you gotta do that for every pose you want to change and this is not automatable, but you can get a advantage in transferring that into other characters if your their topology is the same or similar shape using data transferring (such as the modifier or also I would suggest you using the mesh data transfer addon)
Graph editor. Selected Only. Select top or bottom mouth controls but not both at once. The middle controls are a good place to start.
Search y loc. That should give you just the y curves which for a Rigify mouth should be up and down.
Context menu on the right (N). Set Cursor Y to zero if it isn’t already.
Show Handles off.
If you’re working on the upper lip, select keys above the zero line. If you’re working the lower lip, select the keys below the zero line.
Scale y.
Selecting the corners of the mouth control might be good for scaling x location for a wider mouth.
You can also use proportional editing to fix areas that overshoot what you want.
This process takes a lot longer to type or even read, than the actual graph editor work.
Thanks both for these ideas. I had busy days and hadn’t time to take a look at the answers before today. I’ll definitely use these technics for my next trackings, ty!