Facial Rigging in Games - Morph System or Bone System??

[Integrated]

(I use 3dsmax)

I am looking to add facial animation to my portfolio.. and I have seen two main ways of handling it. The first is to use the Morpher modifier and wire your control objects to different morphers to make shapes.

Secondly I have seen systems where only bones were used, and the control objects move around the bone objects on the face.

I don't even know if game engines support things like morph targets or not, so I was wondering if anyone could give me an idea of how facial animation is produced in game engines? (current gen)

And how many bones are used, or how many morph targets, just any and all information would be MASSIVELY helpful!

Thank you

[alfalfasprossen]

some engines support morph targets, others don't. so it depends on what your targte engine is capable of.
udk for example supports morph targets (and afaik no limitations in number) and you can combine morph and skeletal animation.
i suppose cryengine can do the same, but i don't know.

generally you use as many bones and as many morph targets as are required to get the deformation you want. :think:

[robinb]

Morphing is pretty straight forward in terms of code. I used it on a PS2 game. But it can be pretty expensive in terms of memory and not as flexible as a bone setup. We used a fixed set of Phonemes and drove them with a script to generate speech. That was simple and fairly efficient for what we needed back then.

Now I think bones are more widely used. You can get a lot more variety from that sort of setup and the animation data is pretty cheap compared to having to store a load of head models. Current gen heads tend to be quite high detail so you could run into memory problems using morphs. But the rigging will be way more complex.

[GameGenie]

Morphing is pretty straight forward in terms of code. I used it on a PS2 game. But it can be pretty expensive in terms of memory and not as flexible as a bone setup.

It's all about picking your poison. Pick morphs and you've got an increase in memory usage. Pick bones and you've got a potential increase in CPU usage as the vertex count and number of bones climb.

Morphs aren't all that memory intensive these days. It's not like it was 10 or 15 years ago. Back then, since devs were still mastering 3D. Lots of them would store full frames. 100kb model? A 10 frame animation? 1MB on the disk. Modern morph storage is smarter. A delta system will store the differential. If, on a 10k vertex model, only 100 change, you don't need to store everything that doesn't. I used to mess around with N64 microcode back in the day and that was the only way to get things done sometimes.

[robinb]

Yeah true. We only stored deltas for the PS2 game. The problem is that current gen head models are really very dense geometry wise so even if only part of the face needs to be stored, a lot of verts are still likely to be affected for each morph target.

That's not necessarily a reason not to use them. We found that being able to author speech with a simple text file spat out from the editor and the fact we had no rigger made it very quick and easy to do which was important for the project (low budget). I guess these days the flexibility of bones and the fact you can have a lot more of them tend to win out.

[gurayg]

Hello everyone,

Since you asked for facial animation in 3dsmax, I think it is appropriate to tell you about this;

I've e-mailed and asked the developers of BonyFace for a mo-cap only version of their highly capable Facial animation script.
Which has many features besides using mo-cap data for facial animation.

Although the free version of this script already makes rigging and skinning,
if you would like to go further, such as to animate the rig with mo-cap data,
you'll eventually need the extended tools of BonyFace, which is currently 499$.

BonyFace devs told me that, if I can find 9 other people for the mo-cap only version of BonyFace they will do it.
And more over the first 10 gets the licence for an unbelievable price of 50$.
Regular price of such a version (mo-cap only BonyFace) would probably be 100$ when it is done, they've also told me.


If you are interested in such offer please e-mail scriptattack.com@gmail.com and ask for mo-cap only version of their BonyFace script.
They will contact the first 9 (first one is me people and help them to obtain a licence.

Here is BonyFace web site if you would like to know more

http://www.scriptattack.com/maxscrip...index_eng.html

All questions about BonyFace script should directly go to scriptattack.com@gmail.com
Please also know that; I am not affiliated with them in anyway other than to support what they are doing.

So don't miss this opportunity for such a great script.

Thanks.



What is BonyFace in short?

BonyFace is a professional script solution for rigging and animating facial expressions on 3D-Faces with ease and flexibility.
it works in 3DS MAX 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012

This is the first tool in 3ds max, which starts facial rig creation from scratch, automatically creates skin, adjusts rig parameters and has many powerful tools for animation. With BonyFace you can create full face rig from scratch in 10-20 minutes! There is no analogues in 3ds max at this moment. Since its a script, the user can freely share the BonyFace rigged character with another professional NOT having BonyFace, anyone can load and render the scene with BonyFace-objects without having BonyFace installed like any common 3ds max scene.