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Expression Editor
Apologies if this has already been covered in an update regarding v2, but I've missed a lot and couldn't find any mention of it.
Recently I've done a couple new animations, and involved a lot of tweaking of expressions, but to be honest the interface for doing this is quite fiddly, and it takes a long time to get a face that looks just right. And it got me to wondering; how many expressions do I really use, and why do I need to tweak them?
The answer is that I don't use that many, and mostly the tweaks I do are to make a character look more or less eager, excited, pained etc. between snapshots, and to adjust for a fake "breathing" effect.
So it got me wondering if it might be easier in future to handle expressions differently?
What I was thinking is having an expression editor, probably as its own window that can be opened while editing, where a user can select from preset facial expressions for the current head type (with a little picture preview of each), or they can add their own. These will be static expressions (no driver adjustments) and a user can select one or more of these which they can then mix and match (and set driver values for) to get the right result. When adding your own expression you'd get a special editor showing only the character's head, and the various settings that can be used to adjust until you've got an expression you want to save.
The idea here is to make the process a bit quicker, with presets and previews to make it a lot easier to envision what the end result might look like, and the ability to quickly apply custom expressions you like to use frequently so that doing so takes a couple of clicks, rather than trying to restore the sliders the way you think you had them last time.
Other than this I was wondering if it might make sense for there to be specific support for "breathing"; currently I use the driver sliders to simulate this with a bit of extra open mouth or such, but if each expression had two versions (one normal, one breathing out) then it could be possible for the editor to just have a breathing slider to allow us to independently set how heavily a character is breathing, independently of the speed of the current snapshot (so I could have a character breathing heavily but hardly moving after they finish for example).
There are also some things that should probably be moved out of expressions, for example anus/vagina size (for gaping) and head rotation.
Anyone have any other thoughts? Also feel free to point me to any announcements I've overlooked!
Recently I've done a couple new animations, and involved a lot of tweaking of expressions, but to be honest the interface for doing this is quite fiddly, and it takes a long time to get a face that looks just right. And it got me to wondering; how many expressions do I really use, and why do I need to tweak them?
The answer is that I don't use that many, and mostly the tweaks I do are to make a character look more or less eager, excited, pained etc. between snapshots, and to adjust for a fake "breathing" effect.
So it got me wondering if it might be easier in future to handle expressions differently?
What I was thinking is having an expression editor, probably as its own window that can be opened while editing, where a user can select from preset facial expressions for the current head type (with a little picture preview of each), or they can add their own. These will be static expressions (no driver adjustments) and a user can select one or more of these which they can then mix and match (and set driver values for) to get the right result. When adding your own expression you'd get a special editor showing only the character's head, and the various settings that can be used to adjust until you've got an expression you want to save.
The idea here is to make the process a bit quicker, with presets and previews to make it a lot easier to envision what the end result might look like, and the ability to quickly apply custom expressions you like to use frequently so that doing so takes a couple of clicks, rather than trying to restore the sliders the way you think you had them last time.
Other than this I was wondering if it might make sense for there to be specific support for "breathing"; currently I use the driver sliders to simulate this with a bit of extra open mouth or such, but if each expression had two versions (one normal, one breathing out) then it could be possible for the editor to just have a breathing slider to allow us to independently set how heavily a character is breathing, independently of the speed of the current snapshot (so I could have a character breathing heavily but hardly moving after they finish for example).
There are also some things that should probably be moved out of expressions, for example anus/vagina size (for gaping) and head rotation.
Anyone have any other thoughts? Also feel free to point me to any announcements I've overlooked!