Animating Faces

[adam]

I'm trying to come up with the most efficient way to create blinking eyes or a moving mouth.

 

Are there any examples on the playground?

 

I'm thinking about animating the face like they do Lego characters, but I'm not sure how difficult that would be in Bablylon or if it would be that efficient.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kns2SGCjwUo#t=118

[JCPalmer]

Your example looks like the animation is done with materials.  I had been playing with 'voice syncing' (as opposed to 'lip syncing') using geometry / morphing.  I am therefore dependent a supply of uniform meshes.  Make Human looks like it will that source.

 

I have no idea how to pull this off using materials.  Your set of problems doing it this way is vastly different.

[adam]

I was able to create some very basic blinking eyes in CYOS.

 

http://www.babylonjs.com/CYOS/#211N9K#5

 

There seems to be a bug in CYOS.  It isn't saving the Templates or Meshes.

 

To see the eyes, go to the link above and then select the Basic template and the Sphere mesh and then refresh the page.

[dbawel]

The Legos facial animations are all done with animated textures.  This can be as simple as conditional variable changes representing different textures.  But it all depends on whether you want 2D character faces or 3D character faces.  2D is of course animated textures or image sequences.  However, for 3D meshes and animation, blinking eyes are often hemispheres rotated over 2 or 3 frames to close over the eyeball.  Other facial such as expressions and speech are tytpically blendshapes.