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Skills Expanded

Expressive Face and Hand Hybrid Animation

by Mark Butler

This course will cover facial motion capture and hand animation to help bring your characters to life with expressiveness and believability.

What you'll learn

Most human communication happens with the eyes face and hands. In this course, Expressive Face and Hand Hybrid Animation, you will cover facial mocap and hand animation to bring your characters to life with expressiveness and believability! First, you'll see what makes up a good face rig, and look at the face control options. Next, you'll set up and refine your characters hands and create a library of poses. Next, you'll see some best practices for recording facial motion capture, and creating the mapping from the data to the face rig. Finally, you'll begin refining the performance using Hybrid Animation. After setting up the animation layers, focus will be on making the characters expressive and believable. When you're finished with this course, you'll know how to integrate face and hand data back into your master cinematic scenes, and attach it correctly to the character's body for use in-game. Software required: Maya 2017, MotionBuilder 2017.

About the author

Mark has over 15 years professional experience animating and creating 3D assets in Maya, MotionBuilder, and other CGI software for real-time broadcast and video games. His focus is on character animation, rigging, and motion capture for body, face, and hands. Mark is a pioneer in real-time live performance animation and avatars, using markerless motion capture as well as wireless inertial body suits and gloves. Mark was a part of the Emmy-award winning animation team on NBC’s “Heroes”, and ... more

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