these are good video for hearing other people from the industries research and knowledge they have on apes facial expression and its a good listen for techniques too, i know its mostly focused on mocap but the actors needed to become apes so it took quite an amount of time of research on apes and their expressions.
found a video related to the assignment at hand of someones gorilla facial expression test which i could also use as reference.
Researching for facial ape muscles isn’t as easy as i thought it would be there isnt a lot on the internet but i improvised since we have quite a relation with apes that its not so far off so looking at human facial muscles isnt quite the stretch but i did notice they have more of a bulge on above the eye for brows thats due to the skull as you can see below and their faces are much more compact than of a human, the area below the nose is much more stretched out on apes as you can see there lips are quite stretched and their mouths are bigger than ours. this is an effective way of doing research im finding it a lot easier comparing faces that way you can get a good idea of an apes facial muscles.
the eyebrow area of a ape gives it this very serious look so its hard to tell emotions from the get go because they always look angry, worried and scared but the more you study them that’s standard because of their facial structure and how the skull is shaped
Facial Morphs are quite fun to make i enjoy sculpting i did quite a few different faces in Zbrush and Morphing them in 3Ds Max i tried to make a handful so that it would make it more fun to play with and animate as in instead of making set facial expressions i wanted all different sort of movement like eyebrow movement left/right lip so that you can enjoy controlling the sliders and creating all different sorts of facial expressions with. Yet I’m still not finished some of the faces need refining.
this is a walk cycle someone else created for a zombie its a good walk cycle i like the way the right leg is just draggin while the step taking from the left leg is what supports the leg and when the zombie takes a step with the bad leg he drops his weight on it and quickly places his foot down.
this is a more realistic walk cycle for a zombie but his legs have full function but thats not what im looking at i like his aggressiveness and how the arms swing with the back curled the two videos are good to see how othe people have animated zombies.
After my first lesson and knowing what to do i decided which muscle strands ill insert into the rig i decided to do the bicep, lat, trap and pectoral muscle. once applied i started with the paint weight tool because its a faster and much more efficient way of skinning the Muscle Man, i just began to paint without looking into too much detail because this was only the low resolution mesh. and just wanted to get the weighting right on each bone.
I began with the chest and applied a heavy weight to the more central area of the chest and around it quite light with this muscle strand i made spread onto different muscles so that it can be blended well but i kept it fairly strong so that it doesn’t pull the mesh too much
the trap and the lat muscle i wanted some back definition when my muscle man put his arm down after the arm raise it looks very good on the low poly but i don’t think it would be the same on the high res, it will probably be looking more like creases than actual muscle definition but I’m planning to leave it like this for now and when i paste the skinning onto the high res i can begin to fix up the mesh, I’m getting a real ugly impact when the arm is down as the arm and lat collide with each other its just a case of selecting vertices and getting it right so that it collides well with one another.
The bicep was hard to get right because of where i placed the muscle strand and when the muscle man would incline it would seem as though the bicep muscle was out of place and i began skinning it once i noticed that it wasnt due to the skinning and i moved the muscle into a better position for the curl it messed up with the mesh and caused a lot of chaos in the area and the mesh was a little distorted but i managed to get the incline and muscle squash just right and the skinning began looking decent other than the are forearm muscles collision with the bicep on the curl didnt look too pretty and needs a lot of fixing.
the trap muscle is looking pretty decent it interacts well with the arm raise and i, starting to get a hang of the paint weight tool as i said it squashes well with the arm raise and interacts well with the other back muscle strand i have there.
this video will probably be the best video that i can use as reference because it gives you in clear detail how the muscles function, and you can see how they move from how it is relaxed to it contracted it was a really good find.
this is a good video for the back muscles seeing how they flex from the exterior, i would like to get the same dents and tone to my muscle man i cant see it being a easy task because its a mesh and creating dents would probably end up looking like a cracked mesh but ill have a go at it.
this video here shows a bicep when its contracted and the bulge as the person in the video contracts and relaxes his bicep multiple times, this is a movement i want in my animation and i could use this as appropriate reference.
a full diagram of the body and all its muscles but i mostly want to work with muscles around the sections between the right shoulder spreading to the chest and the back.
preparing to begin working on the muscle man i thought id get some research on where muscle are what muscles they are and how they work. i didn’t know that the pectoral muscle was two different sections the pectoral major and pectoral minor, from the picture below i can see that the pectoral muscles tuck in under the shoulder and begins from the centre of your chest.
i want to add a muscle strand at the back of my muscle man and im thinking that the lat muscle would be a good addition it connects with the back of the shoulder just above the tricep muscle since im thinking of adding a few muscle strands in that area, i think the latissimus dorsi is a good muscle to work with, it helps with the extension of the back and since the animation will involve a arm raise the back would be expanding with it.
The trapezius muscle is another i want to add in there due to the fact that the animation involves a arm raise and it will sqush this muscle, the trapezius muscle is a muscle that supports the arm so its a decent muscle to add into the muscle man and work with.
another movement that will be involved in the animation ill make for my muscle man will be a bicep curl that i plan to show the muscle mans muscle contract to show a big bulge, the bicep is responsible for major movement in the arm from the shoulder to elbow it is a very important muscle and most known muscle in the world.
Mostly following the tutorial and adding on a few extra touches here and there the torso and up was just a procedure of blending it right with each bone a lot of bones are included in this area so a lot of vertices will have multiple bones having some effect to them. i began by sectioning areas and blending them until i was satisfied with the results you just blend it following up the spine.
the chest area again i began by sectioning it off, then blending it appropriately so that it can interact well with the stomach area and the shoulders, i wasn’t too harsh on the blending because its just little movement need from this section for the arm raise because most of it comes from the clavicle bone, i played the animation a few times until i was satisfied with my results and i moved on too the clavicle and shoulder to arm bone.
i find this the cleanest way of working I’ve been talking to some of my peers and they have been trying the paint weighting option but that creates a lot of ptoblems for example vertices digging into the mesh changing the shape of movement and all sorts so i find that this is a cleaner way of way and much more basic and less stressful sectioning off bones to 100% and then blending it to other bones
When I started working with the shoulder I noticed that the when the zombie raised his arm and lowered it completely it would collide and dig inside it looked a right mess but it just looks tricky I had a go at using the paint weights tool for this one to go around the armpit area it gave it a nice blend and stopped the dig and for the arm raise I selected vertices around and weighted them from the top of the arm to half way where the shirt fold is it has a nice blend and the arm raise was smooth.
the arm was tricky but i figured it out by ringing vertices and moving the weight affect until it was looking good because the default movement involves an impossible twist so it was hard to get the weighting right because it involved changing the weighting to individual vertices.Where he twists his arm was hard getting right when the arm twists the whole arm twists but because he has a shirt you wouldn’t be able to see the whole twist movement just from when where there’s bare skin it would need influence from hand and the bones from the upper arm and lower arm light weighting from the upper arm the lower arm just weight it whilst at its extreme pose and weight it till it looks appropriate then weight it from the hand bone too but just a light effect.
The fingers where tricky you would need a lot of different camera angles because it’s quite deceiving when you at looking at it through one angle like I did with all the rest I weighted the vertices 100% in sections then began blending it by ringing the vertices and weighting them but once I played the animation I noticed that from a different angle I was actually squashing the fingers flat so it was vital to check different camera angles once this problem was fixed the fingers would roll smooth and spread nice
i found this quite because the default skin was not so bad and you have to remember this mesh is of a zombie with a cartoony look so it wont be exactly like a human so it doesn’t have to be so strict, so a little more flex in the movement is good all i did really edit was the neck so that it stayed put and didn’t twist so much.
For the foot I began to do basic skinning following the tutorials by sectioning of parts to each bone by selecting vertices around that bone and giving it 100% effect and then blending them bone for bone till it was all correlating properly once I got the shoe moving correctly I made sure that the ankle bone was being effected by the foot and the pants too. The movement was quite exaggerated the best thing to do was to get it as realistic as possible for example the when the toes curl up it is physically impossible to make such movement I done this myself with my toes and I can curl just a little with shoes on you can barely see the movement. With the foot movement you have too add some effect to the trousers because if you was to make the same movement you would notice this causes movement with the trousers if your toes curl up then you would get creases curl down and it would get a pull
The movement where both legs spread and the full on kick was the trickiest because it would create a bulge in the kick but that’s because I was selecting a lot of different vertices and trying my best to fix it which made it worst once I realized that if I ring and work my way down I can get a very nice blend from the pelvic area to the right thigh.
This is physically impossible to for both legs to spread like this but because its a 3D mesh of a zombie exaggerated movement is expected selecting individual vertices was necessary for this movement because you want want good edge flow and a nice stretch to this movement, there should be shared weighting between the pelvic bone and the thigh bone I’m still figuring this out but by the end of the week i want to make sure this is done properly.
For now i just sectioned off the lower torso area ill move onto that as soon as ive finished skinning the legs
Sil's Work 