Morph Targets

One Gordon was painted I needed to get some morph targets made to give him facial expressions. As there is no dialogue in my film I didn't need to worry about making mouth shapes for speech. I set my original character to morph from and started getting to work on some mouth and eyebrow expressions. Having previously only attempted morph targets once before I was fairly new to it and managed to get myself very stressed out. I first tried making the mouth shapes, as my character had become more high poly due to his chin needing more detail to make it smooth, it was near impossible to make it look decent. Mainly because of the flat look to Gordons face. There was crimping and tearing and I very quickly lost my patience! I moved onto the eyebrows to give them a try and not to my surprise the same problems arose.

I needed a solution and fast.

Firstly was to sort out the eyebrows. The answer, was to make separate objects for the eyebrows and create very basic morph targets for these. Easy enough, and if anything helped with the stylisation of my film. Things started to look up. Now for the mouth. I obviously couldnt take the same approach as I took for the eyebrows, as the mouth needed to be attatched to the main mesh. I had an idea. I wasnt sure if it was going to work, but I had nothing to loose. I paid a proffesional to do it!

Only Joking.

I exported the mesh back into Mudbox and morphed the face shapes I wanted. It was much easier using Mudbox as it has a softer approach to morphing objects, and I could get down and dirty with my graphics tablet for a change. Once I had a face shape I liked, I expoted my mesh back into Max, picked the new mesh for the existing one to morph into, and amazingly it worked. I had tried something out of the blue and it worked. If anything for the better. I did this for all the mouth shapes and they all looked really organic! The morphs were done.