Emotional About Emotions
andykarta
Posts: 84
Hey All
I'm doing a video set to music so facial expressions are a major tool in telling the story. And I'm in the parameters in Daz for my Gen2F, and she seems a little stunted emotionally.
Supposedly there's six basic expressions (and let's see if I can name them without looking...) happy, sad, scared, mad, disgusted, and...uh...surprised...yay. But I'm having trouble making some of them. And the default ones don't do it for me. Anger looks like she's pulling the flesh off of a rabbit she just killed with her bare hands. Fear kind of looks, well there's no other way to put it, it looks pornographic. Sad looks like she smelled some bad milk. And so on.
To drill down more, I can't find a way to widen her mouth corners without altering her finished default face and the wide mouth thing makes her look like the Joker. I can't open her eyelids enough to see white above and below the iris. I don't see a way of raising or lowering the inside corner of her eyes. Etc...
Thing is, I've seem some of you dazsters make A-MAZING facial expressions. I saw this one thing on deviantart where the guy was weeping that was beautiful. I saw this one g2F that looked scared out of her mind.
I have maya and know how to make blendshapes so I could do it that way though I guess I'd have to do it for every model. (I'll say it for you, 'well la-de-da Mr I know Maya')... I have no idea how to do it in Daz. And the face poses I've downloaded aren't following the stretch and squoosh rules that the tutorials stress and aren't as exaggerated as I'd like.
So how do you emotional face masters do it? Do I need to learn to make face deformers or whatever they're called. (every 3d software seems to have its own name for these things...) Or is there some other trick.
And I'm not buying them at the daz store.
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Comments
I’m convinced not everyone likes the same thing when it comes to expressions. Some people do appear to like very strong facial posing whereas others like more subtle poses. A lot of how extreme a face pose looks depends on the location of the features. Michael 8 has a mouth that is lower set than usual. I prefer men with higher set mouths and fuller lips. But a lower set mouth will produce a different expression when a pose is applied to it than a man with a higher mouth.
because I couldn’t find expressions I like I made my own. They are in my freebie section. In my thread for gen 8 male. I tend to like expressions with eyebrow movement.
as to how I make mine. I use dials. And a headshot to achieve results. When in doubt look In the mirror or online for inspiration.
I think some people create Morph Expressions, as they tend to give a more realistic look in many cases. You can also use the character morphs to help you achieve an expression you are after - like you said you want to be able to see the eye whites above and below the iris, you might try (after you've widened the eye as far as you can) to apply an iris morph and decrease the iris size a little bit until you can see the whites above and below.
You mentioned using G2, you might try some freebie expressions as a "starting off" point to creating your expressions. I have an expression set that I made for G2 (it should work for both G2F and G2M):
https://www.renderosity.com/mod/freestuff/?item_id=76788
They're not amazing or anything but they're free and they can give you a good starting off point for your expressions.
The Wiki also has a list of freebie poses and expressions that you might find helpful:
https://poserdazfreebies.miraheze.org/wiki/Genesis_2_Female/Poses
https://poserdazfreebies.miraheze.org/wiki/Genesis_2_Male/Poses
Not a master here, but... As in G2, the expressions are morphs, I have bought some of the excpression sets.
From there, I mix the emotions together. It is never just one single emotion, but always a combination thereof, in small measures. When the basic emotion expression is correct that way, I tinker with the jaw, mouth, lips settings until it looks like I want.
It takes time to get the emotions done properly.
The other thing about facial expressions that tends to complicate matters, is the fact that no two characters are going to respond identically to a facial expression preset. Just like real life, no two people are identical and few people have identical smiles. Anyone attempting to duplicate someone else's smiles is likely to end up looking just as bizarre as some of the 3D figures sometimes do. As others have said, using the individual facial posing morph sliders is probably the best route, although you could start with one of the canned presets and work from there. There are two rules I would offer in doing so. One, start with small adjustments and work from there - don't crank those sliders and expect good results; two, start with some idea of what you want - the suggestion to look at yourself in a mirror is a good one, although some might find that silly; three, remember what I said about different people/characters having different facial expressions and adjust to something that suits the character. The only time that I have found facial expression presets that work perfectly as-is for a character is where the creator of that character has included them with the character package, which is relatively rare. Using them on another character may yield entirely different results.
Wow, those are really good! And free!!
You made the diva expressions. In my Daz you have your own catagory. Actually its Catagories/Poses/Expressions/Diva but you're in there. Thanks for the work and the links.
I think I'm wondering what the workflow would be like in making the expressions outside of Daz. The issue is that unless I could transfer the blendshape, I'd need to redo the expressions for every new figure. That would become tedious. In another program there's something called a point cache but I have no idea about how maya handles it. Again still noobish. Maybe my animation eyes are bigger than my animation stomach, but I want accurate expressions.