I’ll try this question again and see if anyone has any ideas for my problem: I want to create mouths for characters that are easy to animate. While watching VeggieTales with my kids, I noticed that their mouths seem to be a bezier circle (easy to animate) that is cut out of the mesh to reveal black (and teeth and such) behind. When I try to do this same thing (created an s-mesh, then deleted some of the vertices for a mouth-hole) the thing looks funny and warped. How would you guys re-create the mouths used for this type of character? (They use Softimage and Maya, but there must be a way in Blender).
Thanks
When you cut the mouth out of the main mesh, make sure you select the vertices that out line the mouth and extrude/move/scale them to get the right shape when using SubSurfs. You may even need to subdivide these verts to get it smooth.
Using this method, it seems my mesh will still be distorted since I’m moving the actual verticies of my face-mesh around. In VeggieTales, it looks like it’s a bezier curve simply moving on the unchanged mesh, although you can see through it. I don’t want to change or move my face mesh at all, I just want to make a circle of it invisible I guess, so I can see the black mouth behind. It LOOKS like that’s what’s happening anyway. Any ideas?
Perhaps here’s a better question: How would you re-create a VeggieTales mouth if you had to? What method would you use to keep it from warping your mesh?
Not easy to answer!!
Depends much on the “mesh quality” you need/want and the amount
of mouth control you need/want
You can use vertex animation techniques (there’s a very nice LipSynch
demo somewhere, do a search), or you can use a Armatures/bones (my prefered.
About the mouth/mesh itself it’s fairly easy. Just "cut " (erase, build)some
polys on the mesh, reshape and make the mouth interior.
I can e-mail you an example!!
Let me know!!
Bye
António
I once did a reasonable approximation of Jr A. I started by building a square and building a green “veg” texture on it. Then I placed my bezier curve mouth at the proper position on this square if it were wrapped around a cylinder. After lip syncing, I rendered an avi of the whole scene. By using this avi as a texture on the Jr. model, I was able to animate the eyes and body motion independently. Although, the mouth is simply black no one who ever saw the finished product noticed that it was not an actual hole in the model.
Lip syncing was a major challenge until I discovered that you can defeat temporal splinning in the ipo window. Actually, I finally only had three positions for the mouth and did the the lip syncing in Premere by placing the three still images in the correct positions.
I like your suggestion. I’ve been playing more with simply using subsurf mesh, which is ok. I’ve been simply moving my verticies in front view to do lipsync, then going to top view to “bend” them to the curve of the round veggie. It’s very rough, and I wish there was a better way. I may give your “texture” idea a whirl, but I was hoping to have a real hole for the mouth. I like the concept though.
here’s a suggestion…
It should be easy to cut a perfectly acceptable round hole in a subdivided cylinder. constrain the movement of the vertices to the Y axis (ie rather close the hole on the outer edges of the mouth to narrow it than moving vertices along the X/Z axis.)
keep the area where the mouth is a cylinder and do not alter the mesh in that area. Animate using relative vertices. Deform the mouth section using a lattice deformation…could work…