facial animation

Hello again:
There was a demo from someone, I think in Germany, featured on the Blitz site awhile ago that was a facial animation demo, does anyone remember it? I cannot find it, or the links, and the search is down, making it more difficult.
Does anyone recall, or have a link?
Thanks!
Dena

I know of a demo called 'CGI Face Expression Demo' (or 'FEE') if thats the one you are after. It was only a exe though, no source code.

It was by By Dieter Marfurt (hanshuber008 ätt yahoo.com). I have no idea if it is still available or has been withdrawn?

Rhy :)

This:



www.melog.ch/dl/fee_theory.zip

Yes, it's only a exe, but it isn't a big deal. I assigned certain vertices to certain face muscles/bones. The preanimated ones look better since they use weighted vertices, but you can also make some tests with realtime bone manipulation.

Basicly it's about face expressions, you could use this theory for toons as well.

To be honest, the theory is not new and it isn't my work. I used to read this in a painting arts encyclopedia by "knaurs" about 20 years ago.

Great! jfk, can you describe your work flow? I need to do something very similiar to this, as preanimated "photorealistic" facial expressions. Did you use the b3d format? Where did you do the actual animation, Max, Maya?

May be this can help

http://www.facegen.com/modeller.htm

It's probably the greatest and easy-to-use face modeller/animator
I have seen, although I don't know if it worths the $495 ...

Paolo.

I have the models animated in Maya, that is not the issue; the issue is getting them into blitz..they were not animated with bones, but with vertex animation and blend shapes, as facial animation is usually done I think...with the exception of Cane Toad, but that is another story. Anyway, I cannot get the animations to export to md2 format; and b3d only supports bone animation, so I am in a bit of a quandry. I think md2 is pretty wonky anyway, the shadows look wierd, and the animations a bit jerky.
I am trying to get the source files for Morph city, to see how the b3d's are done there, but the links are down, and I am getting no responses to my requests.
The animations are a combination of geometry and textures, and are mainly facial expressions and wrinkles.
Any one have any ideas?

sorry for digging in this thread, just realized I never answered it. I used CharacterFX for the Animations. Maya users should try UltimateUnwrap as their converter to B3D. One convertion path may be:
native to .X (DirectX8) to .B3D