MB Tutorial Part 29: Intro Issue 4 Video Lecture | A Complete Course: Motion Builder - Professional Skills

hello everyone and welcome to another
MotionBuilder vtm this time around we're
going to be exploring the intricacies of
facial animation my name is Jason Busby
also known as buzz from 3d buzz dot-com
and joining me as always is mr. Zach
Parrish was uh going mr. Zach pretty
good are you buzz doing doing well you
know one of those days mm-hmm
get set up go do a little animating
gonna have you get over into a little
driving as always oh I wouldn't expect
any less just so that I can be
entertained for a while I'm just kidding
you know I gotta say this act you know
MotionBuilder now yeah I'm really
starting to get a feel for this program
yeah it's a great application now every
time I put you over here to do things
it's not quite as funny as it used to be
several issues back when it was like
with the button go I know I know yeah I
come in here and you're doing stuff in
it kind of scary if you think about it a
little yeah okay so this vtm is going to
take a look at how we would go about
getting models from Maya and 3ds Max and
bringing them over into MotionBuilder
performing facial animation there's a
few different approaches that we can
take and pulling the animation off and
we'll take a look at all three different
approaches that are available and then
finally we'll look at exporting
everything back over into the
appropriate application now before we
really get started I'd like to take a
second and thank somebody here the
lovely model that you now see in the
viewer happens to be that of mr. Joe
Clark oh yeah Joe thank you very much
for lending us your model for showing
and demonstrating how to go about doing
facial animation in MotionBuilder
actually it's really creepy it's like
Joe actually lent us his head this is a
model of his own head and it looks so
much like him that it's actually quite
scary what's up there yes he just said
something - here you go feel good I feel
good Joe's Joe's old student Joe's also
Joe used to work for me he moved on he's
now working for Microsoft and the Xbox
division oh wow yeah and Joe is just an
incredible animator unbelievable modeler
and it was really nice to him to kind of
step up to the plate him and I were
talking on the phone I was like you know
I'm gonna have sac put together some
facial stuff and a whole bunch of
different morph targets and he's like
well so how long you're going to give
Zach to do it as like
my standard probably 3040 minutes and
he's like oh no no how would you like to
use my head I mean this would be
probably a little easier on Zach so I
think he felt the pain that Zach was
gonna be going through I think he did I
think he understands the kind of
pressure the buzz can put on a purse so
hey I try not to I'm sorry so it was
very kind of him to donate his head for
doing this absolutely he's walking
around headless so let's go an email it
back to him later yes so thank you very
much Joe so let's go ahead and take just
a second actually talk about some of the
lessons basically we're going to be
looking at in the next lesson how to go
about model setup basically it's going
to be defining your shapes is what
they're called inside of MotionBuilder
we're talking about your morph targets
or your blend shapes we're not going to
go through actually doing the modeling
required to take a base model and deform
it into a target if you will that you
will blend to write what we will do is
we will talk about blend shapes inside
of Maya and how you set them up and we
will talk about morph targets inside of
3ds Max and how you go about setting
that up after that is set up will then
show you how to export your file over so
that you can pull it into motion builder
and then once inside a motion builder
we'll move on to taking a look at first
the character face and actor face assets
two very important assets when working
with facial animation and motion builder
from there we'll take a look at
animating with keyframes why because
that's generally where you start when it
comes to animation right it's just like
a standard for a basic keyframe
animation now of course we've got a
lesson so I know all you guys out there
already know how to do keyframe
animation but there's some things that
you need to know here in regards to
what's the relationship between taking
your model and having it blend between
all of your different shapes that you
have brought in how do you go about
scrubbing through audio that you've
brought in I mean so there's a few
things that we do need to go over it's
not going to be a long lesson but still
an important lesson from there we're
going to go back out over into Maya and
we're going to take a look at clusters
what clusters are how you go about
setting them up and then we'll come back
into motion builder with the lesson
after that and we'll talk about how to
go in and create cluster groups and then
how to animate those cluster groups
which is another method of doing facial
animation inside of motion builder all
right then
there we're going to move in to an
explanation of how to use voice devices
this is where things get really cool
this is where basically you can say I
don't feel like doing all the work of
animating by keyframes and cluster too
much moving stuff around I just wanted
to be automatic exactly so you can just
go in there and start talking into your
computer and your model will talk right
back to you yeah exactly it'll you can
just set it up basically it'll work off
of input coming in from a microphone
it'll work off WAV files it's very cool
how it works there's some setup involved
there's some tweaking involved but if
you get it panned out nicely it's really
amazing very power and we've used it
once before at the Renaissance Center we
actually had film box there back in the
day of film box and we actually use
voice reality for doing a character that
was projected up on a 60-foot dome and
the character was able to talk and
interact with the crowd it was really
cool oh very simply we had a person up
in the top of the cyber sphere as we
call it's a planetarium more or less and
they were the one back there actually
controlling the the computer and
everything and then we had an actor that
or somebody that walked around with a
microphone and they could ask people
questions the question was asked in the
person up in the top could then respond
and this huge character up on the screen
would then talk back in real time and it
was amazing that's incredible really
really cool stuff so it's very fun a lot
a lot of Technology a lot of power
available right here at your fingertips
that's awesome so we'll explore how to
go about setting up voice devices and
then after all that we'll finally wrap
everything up with how to go about
plotting and exporting your animation
back over into Maya or 3ds max okay okay
so that's what we've got lined up in
this vtm right here shouldn't be a very
long one like some of the ones in the
past really easy to go about sending
this stuff up but very important that
you know how to do it so with that Zack
let us go ahead and get started let's
rock
you