Character Animation

Joshua Hoare
Jul 24, 2017 · 3 min read

Side Specialisation

I’ve never touched up on morph targets in the past, so i thought I'd jump right into the deep end and take it on without a tutorial!

Once i finished modelling to a level I was confident with animating, i asked Steve what the best way to to do the morph targets would be and he suggested that i make an indentation within the mouth. “Make it like a sock”. So i got that down as such and am now able to fit a tongue and teeth.

I later realised that although i had the mouth i didn’t really have the sock “ part of the throat, which is fine due to it being rick and so simplistic.

From here i searched in the modifier stack for morph target, but only found morph. I hit apply and it was pretty easy from there. Just duplicated the face and changed it, applied it to the modifier by attaching a mesh to the stack and wallahhhh i had the 0–100% morph target value which was changeable and did exactly what i wanted.

As you can see on the right side i already have about 7 different morph targets which i have made by looking at small clips of Rick Sanchez speaking in Rick and Morty episodes on YouTube.

Here’s a screenshot i took early on in this process.

After the blend shapes i am starting to Rig.. here most of all i hope to achieve my first ever advanced animation rig, which i can use to animate future characters with.

Progress 1

After messing around with the rig for a bit after getting it to this point i talked to Steve and decided to restart using a digital tutors tutorial that would run me through everything I'd need to know. And well.. 58 saved files later!

I got there…

Skeleton

Controls

Morph Targets

Model

All Together

Reference

App.pluralsight.com. (2017). https://app.pluralsight.com/player?course=3ds-max-creating-realistic-low-poly-tree-2420&author=jayesh-ranavaya&name=3ds-max-creating-realistic-low-poly-tree-2420-m3&clip=4&mode=live

YouTube. (2017). Creating Morpher Targets for Facial Animation in 3DS Max. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O9dJCT6AuCM

Vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net. (2017). Cite a Website — Cite This For Me. https://vignette1.wikia.nocookie.net/rickandmorty/images/e/e7/Vlcsnap-2015-01-31-04h33m02s175.png/revision/latest?cb=20150131123326

Not too many things were researched in the creation of this blog/asset. It really relied a lot on my knowledge of previous studios and MDU classes.

Joshua Hoare

Written by

Animation Student

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