Difficult to model Asian features

[CallHarvey3d]

you might also be able to take advantage of is the expression mixer. it has brow and eye lid sliders you may be able to create an expression to add to the base asian and build from there

[blindsaypatten]

I created a custom target to lift the brow region:
https://drive.google.com/open?id=0BwpPn ... mtUeWFuaFE

Applied to the default model with gender at 100% male, ethnicity at 100% Asian, and with Eyebrows001 it looks like this:

Are there things that make a target "good" or a "kludge"? For example that make them play better with other targets? I tried to largely preserve the shape of the eyebrows if they are there.

[joepal]

Targets will inevitably have interactions. For example combining fat and skinny targets would probably look wierd.

The best recommendation is to model for the situation where you intend the target to be used. If the target is intended for female characters, then model it as a secondary target on a female character in blender.

For "improved asian" features, I guess you might want to model on a toon which is 100% asian, 0% caucasian, 0% african.

MakeTarget supports loading target files, so you can load the asian macro detail target before starting to model.

[blindsaypatten]

With custom eyebrow and forehead targets I was able to get this far:

Asian1ColorCorrected.jpg (10.87 KiB) Viewed 7318 times

I had to redo the eyebrow target to make it play nicely with the forehead target.

The thing which is most driving me a little crazy is the droop in the outer upper eyelid which the Asian slider puts there and which isn't right and I can't get rid of with the built-in controls. The Asian setting also makes it impossible to get the upper lip I want. In both cases I can get the shape I want with the Caucasian setting. I still can't get the jawline I want either. The eyebrows aren't great either but that's not surprising. Oh well, I'll keep at it.

[jujube]

I haven't even caught up yet but I'm loving this thread; once again the low position of the eyebrow hairs bugs me too.
edit:(Your asian model so far looks great, by the way. )

[RobBaer]

For the record, the low eyebrows crept in some time back and I reported the issue: http://bugtracker.makehumancommunity.org/issues/814. There was some discussion, and not being an artist myself, I came to think I was just seeing things.

But, until we have some artistic help for core asset development and maintenance, though, I fear we are stuck with the types of fixes our talented community members can offer up. Keep up the good work!

[blindsaypatten]

Here's my latest issue with modeling Asians, including a small insight I've had regarding making targets work together.

I think it is a weakness of the built-in modeling tools that they try and isolate the treatment of the back of the jaw and the front/chin, in the case of the Asian model this makes it impossible to produce a straight jawline with any prominence. With the Caucasian model you can always find a balance between prominence and chin width, but with the Asian model you can't because the angle of the rear half of the jaw is greater than what you can produce by adjusting chin width.

If the jaw width, chin width, and chin prominence adjustments all adjusted the full length of the jaw then they could be adjusted independently while maintaining a straight jawline. I encountered the same thing with my brow ridge adjustment target, initially I only adjusted the mesh near to the brow ridge, which worked fine when with the default forehead shape, but then when I made a second target to produce a flatter forehead I ended up with a bend/corner when I used the two together. By having the brow ridge target adjust all the way to the top of the forehead this problem went away.

Here are the default models for male Caucasians and Asians:

Note the difference in angles between the back and front of the jaw for the Asian model.

You can see the difference clearly when you add some chin prominence:

With the Caucasian model you can usually find a combination of prominence and chin width to produce a realistic straight jaw:

But with the Asian model no amount of chin width adjustment will produce a straight jawline:

I'm working on a jaw width target that preserves a straight jawline:

[blindsaypatten]

For the record, the low eyebrows crept in some time back and I reported the issue: http://bugtracker.makehumancommunity.org/issues/814. There was some discussion, and not being an artist myself, I came to think I was just seeing things.

But, until we have some artistic help for core asset development and maintenance, though, I fear we are stuck with the types of fixes our talented community members can offer up. Keep up the good work!

If you want to confirm that things are off just go to the eyebrow tab of the face tab and increase the eyebrow bulge factor, you can then flip through the various eyebrow options and see that they are pretty much all placed seriously too low relative to the eyebrow ridge.

I suspect the problem is with the eyebrow ridge placement rather than the eyebrow placements, although in the end it is a matter of them being aligned. Using leftinnerbrowup in the expression editor one can see more of the problem:

Since the images in your bug report aren't there anymore I can't say for sure, but if there was a shift I wonder if the eyebrow ridge placement was moved upward at some point rather than the eyebrows shifting downward.

[jujube]

While we're on the subject, another eyebrow related issue - the eyebrow bones are kind of weird, they twist the whole eyebrow area and can't seem to be able to raise/lower the eyebrow in a realistic/simple(?) way. I can put pics up later.

(But like RobBaer said, while me and others can work on targets, we don't seem to have anyone who can do weighting/rigging.)

edit: blindsaypatten's last pic illustrates it - instead of raising just the eyebrow clothes, the entire brow ridge is deformed, deforming the skull itself.
Making a new eyebrow clothes file placed higher up could help with the brow placement issue, although I'm not sure what the makeclothes procedure would be for that.

[blindsaypatten]

I made a new target that repositions the mesh over the brow ridge so (at least some of) the eyebrows appear, and also allows the brow to be moved out so the amount of brow "overhang" to be increased without having a big ridge.

I was trying to model this guy:

I think my guy could be his brother. (Or at least a close cousin!)

It seems to me that controlling eyebrow (hair) position is going to be difficult. The eyebrows are attached to the mesh of the face so the only way to move them the way they should move is to move the mesh contours they are attached to while maintaining the shape of the mesh. For eyebrows that are above the ridgeline that's not too hard, but most eyebrows (men's anyway) are below the ridge on the inside end and above it on the outside end.