Researching and creating the biped rig - Part 4

With the body completed, the next step is adding facial morphs. I started by reading the official help document for the Morpher Modifier in 3DS Max. The modifier works by allowing you to create multiple expressions for the face, and then it creates toggles that you can use to automatically morph the face into those positions. As well as expressions, you  can use facial morph to set up lip syncing, creating morphs for different mouth shapes.

In order to get a better idea of the process in action, I watched a tutorial video by Lee Jackson on YouTube, which runs through a very basic set of facial morphs. In the video, he suggests that you should do the different parts of the face separately, so that the morphs become modular and can be used simultaneously.



Although I was slightly tempted to try rigging the whole face manually, I feel that using facial morphs is quicker and easier than attempting to create individual bones and skinning the face manually.

I plan to make facial morphs for the following expressions:

• Raised eyebrows
• Furrowed eyebrows
• Left eye blink
• Right eye blink
• Flared nostrils
• Smiling mouth
• Grinning mouth
• Frowning mouth

For the lip syncing, the Autodesk help document suggests creating faces for the following:

• A, I
• E
• F, V
• C, D, G, J, K, N, S, T, Y, Z
• L, T
• O
• U
• W, Q
• M, B, P

Instead of using letters, I feel that creating faces based off phonetic sounds (such as Oo, Sh, and Uh) makes more sense, as this is how go about doing lip syncing for my 2D animations. To help me visualise the faces, I found a very useful lip syncing tutorial by John Randall Gossman. Although the tutorial is made to help with traditional, 2D animation, he still provides a very useful chart of phonetic face poses on a cartoon character that I can use as a reference. He also shows how the faces should be placed along a timeline with an example audio clip.