Face animation

I have used the morpher to animate my head. I created a short sequence showing various facial expressions. These are a smile, surprise, a frown, a wink and blinking.

Using autokey the settings for each of the morph target could be animated.Using the dope sheet gave more control than just the timeline as it made it easier to see which keys were set for each morph.

Dope sheet

All keys in place

Smile

I closed the eyes a little bit to that they were not so wide and moved the slide for the smile morph so that it was 100%.

Surprise

I closed slightly more before this expression to create more anticipation for the movement. I then opened the eyes fully along with the mouth and raised the left and right eye brow. I moved the top lip up slightly to improve the shape of the mouth.

Frown

I kept the eyes a little bit closed and moved the slider for the frown morph to 100%. I also used the brows down morph as well.

Wink

I set the smile slider to 100% and eye closed one of the eyes briefly.

Blink

For the blink I closed both the eyes close at same time for a short amount of frame.

Curve editor

Once the keys were set for the animation I used the curve editor to adjust the tangents to speed or slow the animation.

Curve editor

For the blink I set both the ascending and descending part of the curve to a fast tangent so that the eyes opened and closed very quickly.

Blink curve

For the surprise expression I  set the curve for opening the mouth, brows up and eyes open to a fast tangent and left the end of the curve how it was. The curve for the wink was set to a slow tangent so that this animation happened more slowly.

Mouth open curve

More morph targets could be created to allow more expressions to be made by the face. I didn’t use any head movements in the animation but these could be added to make the expressions look more realistic.

Having animated this section I have seen that some of the morph targets that I have created could be made to be moved more as the 100% full movement is still very slight when applied to the head.

The rendered animation is 14 seconds and can be seen above. The video is low quality when uploaded to blogger but allows the animation to be seen.