marionettes skin

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

not necessarily off topic, but not necessarily about arch illustration either. so i was sitting here, watching Team America, and started thinking about the marionettes. maybe something already exists like this, maybe not. i don't do facial animation, so i am not overly familiar with different techniques available to the pro artists.

 

so the marionettes have a basic armature structure that has a series of hinges and joints of different types. then these armatures are covered with a silicon or similar type of rubber. the rubber moves, folds slightly, and wrinkles as the puppeteer moves the controls for the mouth. it is not necessarily real reactions in the skin, but there is a natural movement to it.

 

so my thought.. how do they animate for hollywood. i know there is motion capture, linked bones systems, and who knows what else. ....but what about the surface materials of the characters. i know there is extensive studies to reproduce the characteristics of skin, but is there currently study on how to reproduce the reactive elastic effects of the skin? so that a character that had a skin material applied to the skin has extra layer of information built in. so that when the virtual armature or bone system is moved, the skin reacts based on mathematic calculations. a fold there, a bulge there. stuff that may have to currently be animated manually or through motion capture.

 

there are particle animation systems that recreate fire, water. cloth systems that reproduce the flow of cloth in the air, as the breeze blows through a window.

 

so what about skin systems, how complex are they, and do they already exist?

[jarrek]

It's not that complex I think. There must be many ways of achieving this effect but in most cases the facial expresions are series of morph targets ( whole face or its parts ). You can also have the 3d face model turned into softbody and the particle network can have painted various reaction weights for various elasticity during movement...

This is only the top of the iceberg for this topic but hope you got the general idea.

 

Any other interesting archviz questions ? ;-)

[Crazy Homeless Guy]

I didn't necessarily think it was that complex, I was just tossing around an idea of how characters in the CG world could be further developed by adding physical reaction characteristics to the skin. Say, you push on the skin with your finger. It is already preprogrammed to react, stretch, bend in a certain way with no animation needed. ...or say. it is attached to a jaw skeleton. the skin react a certain way without the need for additional animation. In the sense that it behaves more like a physical material.

 

When I was in school, we had a handful of conversationin one of my computer classes about software that simulates the physical characteristics ofthe materials of buildings. The materials had properties that would control how you could use them. i.e. you couldn't make a thin glass wall that has a sheer force applied to it, because it would break. This was programmed into th ecomputer, and it would keep you from doing this. I guess in a way we were discussing a sophisticated BIM program.

 

For now, it is definetly easier to animate faces in the way they are doing it, but as more computer power becomes available, I can see more sophisticated mathmatic calculations being used to simulate how things would react in real world enviroments.