Face morph targets + teeth(jaw)+tongue

[Trkls]

Hi guys, I am looking for a good 3d max tutorial on animating Jaw(teeth) and tongue... I will be using morph targets for face expressions.

tutorial "Attaching an animatable Head to an animatable Body" by Seán Forsyth " mentions Max's wire parameters... but i could not figure it out...

[lovelavendra]

There are two ways to animate or rigging the face
1. by using skin which is easy in use
2. by using physique (biped) which typical to handle

Discribe you problem in detail or contact me personally or send me yours modeled face to me at my email address (lovelavendra@yahoo.co.in) so i can fit bones for you.

[Trkls]

Lovelavendra, thank you for your reply,
I am using morph targets to create face expression (and then animate with sliders)
(i do not want to use bones)

however I have a teeth as a separate object which i would like to open according to the face expression (in other words "conect" bottom jaw to the chin and have it rotate/move as chin moves.
I assume it could be done using wire parametrs, but i was not able to find any good tutorials on it.

[Romu]

I dont know the details, but it is possible to link the teeth to some certain facet in the jaw...

[ross_coe]

This is how I would tackle this....check the attached picture

in this picture you can see the BONE_Head, BONE_Jaw and head_CTRL selected. The BONE_Jaw is linked to BONE_Head, which is then linked to head_CTRL. head_CTRL is used mainly for the rotation of the head, but it also has a custom attribute added that controls the opening and closing of BONE_Jaw (see the modifier at the side of the pic)

Then if you look at the modifier for Joe_Head you'll see that I added my morph modifier. I had about 30 morphs for talking and expression. After that I added a skin modifer as you can see, which has BONE_Head, BONE_Jaw and a few other bones added. From here, the verts around the jaw area of the character were influenced by the BONE_Jaw, so that the Head_CTRL controller could have it's custom attribute animated for the character jaw to open and close. Then the morph modifier on Joe_Head was also animated for the lip-sync :)

Anyways, hope that all makes sense. I did that for a uni project last year....and it seemed to work pretty well. I got top marks for that project anyway :)

[ShadowMaker SdR]

But how do you get the custom attribute to actually do something? Is that done through wiring or something else?

Sander de Regt

[ross_coe]

yeah the custom attribute is done through wire parameters.
selecting the controller with the custom attribute, right-click and choose "wire parameters" from the menu, then "modifed object"---->"attribute holder"----->"custom attribute"---->(whateve u named your custom attribute)
from here you have to pick the object that this will controll....so in the example above that would be the "BONE_Jaw". Then from the menu that comes up you pick whatever rotation or transform or whatever you want to manipulate (I used Z rotation). Then it's a case of making a one-way connection from left to right in the new window that opens up, adding some maxscript into the box at the bottom right (in the case above it was "-0.2*degToRad JawOpen - 2.25"), and then clicking "connect".
After all that....things should work pretty well.....hopefully :D

[Trkls]

Thank you! I have not tried to do that yet, (moving and all)... but it looks like it is exactly what i wanted to do.
I hope it helps someone else as well
thank you again (youll see me back with more questions within a week :D:D:D)