How head models work

[Deleted2783630User]

I'm attempting to invent a new race, so I need to learn how head models work.

 

First of all, how do I add facial animations properly. I have the impression that I'd use Blender's shape keys, but I don't know what morphs are required. And whenever I've imported an existing head model there weren't any shape keys.

 

Second, in the head models I've imported there were three bones (neck and two clavicle bones). I'm wondering how I'll best rig my new head mesh to the clavicle bones so that no seams appear whenever a character using my head model moves his neck. I'm thinking right now i'll just leave the neck of an existing head model intact and just replace the rest of the head with my new model.

[Ghogiel]

the morphs are stored in a separate facegen file, .tri.

 

The morph names used in oblivion are listed here http://cs.elderscrolls.com/constwiki/index.php/Facial_expressions_in_animations

 

To create and get working morphs out of blender into the tri is documented on this site somewhere I believe, or at least semi documented. The only thing you really need to make certain of is vertex index order needs to remain intact between each morph state and to get those out of blender and pack them into a tri file. There is a app that packs objs into a tri file iirc.

 

 

neck seam: just make sure your head mesh terminates with same number of vertices. Just snap to vertex your meshes neck vertices to the vanilla head neck vertices. Then when it comes to assign vertex weights to the mesh, just copy the vertex weights over from the vanilla head to your head.

Edited August 6, 2011 by Ghogiel

[Alecu]

New head meshes are a bad joke. Don't even think about facial animations. Such things don't even exist in games really. No matter how much you morph the face, the game engine will never update the shadows of the face to highlight the wrinkles and stuff so it will never work. What you can get at most are some changes of the mouth and area around the eyes, but that's about all. This is the biggest mistake people ever make. I've modeled many facial expressions for a new head I was making and they didn't work at all! This is hard coded in the game engine and there is probably nothing you can do about this.

 

And facial expressions are nothing compared to the expressions used by the head when it talks. They are called phonemes and are quite hard to model accurately or at least it was for me because I couldn't find any good references.

 

The tri and egm formats are a bad joke. They aren't entirely known and documented. I made a program that somehow edited those expressions but it wasn't complete and I kinda lost the source code and the enthusiasm to work on it. The program was called FaceMix and it kinda allowed to edit those facial morphs and even add the most notorious morphs, the eye morphs to a head. Search it on tesnexus. It may be not that user friendly.

 

If you want to make a new head like that, be prepared to encounter some trouble at first and learn a lot of new things. This isn't just about the race anymore if you want a new head. It can be a lot of fun but also hard work too.

 

And as I said above, don't even bother with complex facial animations. They just don't work. The only morph that *may* have a lot more impact on the face would be the vampire morph.

 

And about the face adjustments morphs. That is actually a linear system with an infinite amounts of solutions or something like this. Each morphs affects more than 3 sliders that you have in the race menu when making a character. Those are the morphs that you edit in blender with shape keys. You can't even edit the tri morphs in blender which control the facial expressions.

 

And yes, there are various kinds of morphs: expression morphs(when a face smiles, is angry etc),eye morphs(when a face blinks, squints etc) and the facial adjustments morphs(that control the shape of the face like width, chin width, jaw shape etc). I spent a lot of time on the last kind of morphs and couldn't figure out how they work.

 

 

So if you read this far you should know these things:

- blender doesn't edit the facial expressions just the facial adjusments morphs that are used to adjust the shape of the face in the race menu.

 

 

-there are 3 kinds of head morphs:facial expression morphs, facial adjusments morphs(used by the race menu to edit the shape of the face) and eye morphs(they control the eye expression like blink, squint etc)

 

 

-you can't generate an egm and tri file directly with blender. You need to use the conformulator which can be found here

 

 

-I never found a way to edit the facial adjustment morphs because they affect more than one slider from the race menu. Change one morphs and you change at least 3 slider from the race menu. Those are carefully balanced. One change and they will get out of balance. Normally when you reset a face, the sliders get set in a position that negates all the morphs effects. When you change a facial adjustment morph, they will never be negated and your face will never look by default like the one you modeled in your 3d program of choice. You can ruin your head mesh

 

 

-facial expressions will never look ingame like they do in the 3d modeling program. Here are several examples of how they look in-game and how they originally looked when I modeled them:

 

 

http://www.tesnexus.com/imageshare/images/34601-1296686693.jpg

 

http://www.tesnexus.com/imageshare/images/34601-1296773095.jpg

 

 

See, the creases around the mouth that appear when you smile don't show up in-game ever despite being modeled and added in the tri file properly

 

 

-the conformulator doesn't generate the eye morphs. You need to manually add them

 

 

-the conformulator only tries to copy the morphs from another head

 

 

-I made a program that adds those eyes morphs which can be found here

 

 

-the program mentioned above can replace any morph inside from the egm files and tri files but I don't see a way to properly generate custom facial adjustment morphs

 

 

-the tri files stores the face expression moprhs and only a PART of the eye morphs, the egm file contain the facial adjustment morphs used in the race menu and a PART of the eye morphs

 

 

-throttlekitty made a tutorial about eye morphs and facial morphs in general which can be found here

 

 

 

-the stupid program that I made to add eye morphs and edit facial morphs is called FaceMix. It works a lot with precision of numbers,scales units of measurements

 

 

 

-you need to watch some tutorials about modeling heads if you haven't had any experience with them.

Edited August 6, 2011 by Alecu