The Mystery of 'O'

Works in progress and technical screen shots.

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The Mystery of 'O'

Postby brkurt » Thu Jun 26, 2014 9:35 pm

While everyone (it seems) is waitng for the new rig, with the facial expressions and visemes, I thought I would post this quick note to the Gallery about how to create visemes using the existing rigs in Blender. I am mostly using MH 1.1 (unstable) with Blender 2.70a, but for this instance I'm going to use MH Alpha 5.1 with Blender 2.63a (on a PowerMac G4 that someone gave me).

First is the drawing and conceptual page. As much as I love Preston Blair and Gary C. Martin visemes for the 'O' mouth shape, the problem is that they are focussed on 2d drawings, so an O looks like a elastic band. In reality, an 'O' shape is the combination of two 'C' shapes, mirrored horizontally:

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It requires eight mouth bones to create this shape, which if I am viewing the video correctly is the number the new 1.1 rig uses:

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And here it is, the most difficult viseme to create, using only pose bones, with no subsurface subdivisions. Better yet, you can add these bones to the muscle rig, without any major changes.

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Last edited by brkurt on Wed Jul 16, 2014 10:41 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: The Myster of 'O'

Postby brkurt » Wed Jul 16, 2014 10:36 pm

As many others are beginning to do, I'm taking a crack at the new rig.
The following images are a synthesis of an existing rig for my Berylia character, with some new refinements from the MH 1.1 rig.

The new rig is a radical departure from any others I have seen.

As always, I start with the viseme 'O'

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and here is a texture-mapped version of the same.

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and here is a better one; mouth corners and cheeks now work together. I also re-oriented the mouthCorner bones for less mess distortion.
Notice that I have turned off subsurface subdivisions, but the mouth contours are smoother.

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and finally, tne new face rig with subsurface subdivisions. I'm using the Gary C. Martin / Preston Blair viseme illustrations to determine how much tongue and teeth should be visiblle.

Image
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Re: The Mystery of 'O'

Postby SaltyCowdawg » Fri Jan 23, 2015 9:25 pm

cool insight
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Re: The Mystery of 'O'

Postby brkurt » Fri Feb 20, 2015 8:25 pm

Okay, and now let's work with the latest mesh and rig. I hope no one gets too upset, but I've modified the rig (just slightly!) to work in stop-motion. When I'm finished with a full set of 15 visemes and 7 emotional expressions, I'll post the models as blender, collada and motion capture files.

Visemes are interesting, because even in just one language no one can quite decide how many there are. I'm going to use Thomas' set from Alpha 6.

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So here is the original (new) model, with rig and texture mapping.

First the Face, using bright red for the face group bones:

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And then the full body. I've had to make a lot of changes here, because the martial arts animations involve contortions:

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Here is the model. I used Automatic Weighting, and it works quite well.

http://www.geekopolis.ca/blender/visemes/guinnivereFullRig1_266a.blend
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Re: The Mystery of 'O'

Postby brkurt » Fri Feb 27, 2015 2:48 am

Here's the starting point. This is the truly ancient mhx export for Blender 2.49b (I like to think of it as "Blender Lite").
This is Thomas' lip sync for the letter 'O'.

The reason I'm using this is because I just found out that Papagayo (formerly Moho) is still being developed for Windows 7 & 8, beta Version 2.01.
The resulting .dat file output looks pretty good, all things considered.

Since the model has a decidedly 3d Anime look to it, with my own hand-painted textures, it will work for my graphic novel just fine.
You can look over the old visemes also: http://www.geekopolis.ca/blender/visemes/old_visemes.zip

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If you're brave, and have an older computer around, you can try the model...good luck!


http://www.geekopolis.ca/blender/visemes/gailLipSync1_249b.blend

I had to overhaul this model, as the python scripts wouldn't stay stable. So...I took the version of the new rig and applied it to the old mesh, using automatic weighting.
After about twenty minutes, this is what I could do. I've simply used the IK solver for a chain length of 3, and then grabbed the innerEyeBrow bones.

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And it gets better! Here are furrowed eyebrows combined with a snarl.

Image
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Re: The Mystery of 'O'

Postby brkurt » Sat Feb 28, 2015 3:30 pm

And, on to the new. When a novice lip sync artist starts out, they usually go to the Preston Blair or Gary C. Martin websites, which tell you to start with a simple open-jaw suppressed-tongue 'Aah'. So..let's say 'Aah'!

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The problem with this approach is that one is encouraged to start with easy visemes, and end with hard ones. In this thread, I'm suggesting that you take the engineering approach, and solve the hardest problem first, namely, the 'O' family of 'O', 'OO', 'U', 'Q' and 'W'.

These English-language visemes should sound like 'Oh!' ,'Cool', 'You', 'Queue', 'What?'.

The first step is to carefully decide how much influence each of the mouth bones has. I'm going with the most limited number of vertices for this model. More importantly, I had to disconnect oris05, oris03_R and oris03_L from their parent bones to get the control of the lips I need.

Here's the result for the top lip, a 'Eeww' expression. I will use this pose later for the Disgust emotion.

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And on to the 'O' family. I'm going to accent the 'O' by letting a few of the front teeth remain visible, for the sake of argument. That way, each following member of the family is created by bring the bones closer together. Note that I've created an 'innerJaw' bone to set the lower dentures where I want them.

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And here is the updated model. I'm using Blender 2.64a because it runs on Ubuntu 9.04, which is the best I could do with rack servers from 2006.

http://www.geekopolis.ca/blender/visemes/guinnivereFullRig1_264a.blend

and on to finish this family. Note that I've used subsurfing for the last viseme--W--because this model is meant to be ported through Collada to just about any 3d app. I will of course created accompanying shape keys in Blender, but they don't port as far as I know.

Image

Image

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Re: The Mystery of 'O'

Postby brkurt » Sun Mar 01, 2015 5:35 pm

And on to the next family, which I was surprised by!

'R' is not related as I thought to the 'E' family, but to the 'Aah' family. 'Father' and 'farther' are pronounced the same in the Middlesex English (the standard for English pronunciation).

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The 'E' family is primarily created by contracting the smile muscles up and across. You can test this be gritting your teeth and pronouncing 'EE'. Works just fine.

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The 'Eh' sound is very important, because is the 'filler' after many consonants. For example try to say 'B' without adding a puff of air. Can't be done.
So: 'B' = 'B' + 'Eh'; 'M' = 'M' + 'Eh'; P = 'P' + 'Eh'.

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And here is a 'G'. The general agreement seems to be a pose between 'EE' and 'Eh':

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and what I believe is the last member of this family, 'S':

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and on we go. The next family is the 'everted lips' one; I totally agree with the next viseme, which is not in the Preston Blair or Gary C. Martin set.
It is 'SH' as in 'Shut up!'

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Here's a fairly easy one--again not in the Preston Blair or Gary C. Martin set--which is readily identifiable. It is 'TH" as in "Though..."

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Re: The Mystery of 'O'

Postby brkurt » Mon Mar 02, 2015 1:49 pm

Okay, let's finish off with the easy visemes.

The first is 'AI', pronounced 'Eye' or 'Aye' depending which side of the pond you live on. It is basically a combination of 'Aah' and 'EE', with the tongue suppressed.

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Another variant of the combination of 'Aah' and 'EE' is 'L'. Pronounced 'Elle' but looks like 'La'.

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Finally! The 'puffy lips' family. For English-speakers this is 'BMP' and 'FV'. 'BMP' uses everted lips; 'FV' uses inverted lips. Note that I've made 'FV' to look like a trumpeter's embouchure.

BMP:

Image

FV:

Image

And here is the first test video of the visemes, before I add shape keys.

http://youtu.be/WbDLemS57mQ
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Re: The Mystery of 'O'

Postby brkurt » Thu Mar 12, 2015 12:34 am

And just to be thorough...here is the old Alpha 5.1 mesh with a new, improved facial rig (though not the MH 1.1 one):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqoYypBC6ts
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