In every day interactions with people, we look to a person’s face for visual cues to help us assess what they are thinking or feeling. This is why facial animation is so important.
The intricate movements of the face can make the difference between a character that is believable and a character that does not engage the audience.
Various facial expressions on a bird character face
Creating a face that moves in complex ways can convey realistic, believable emotion. MotionBuilder lets you accomplish this by animating head models with keyframes, voice recognition, and motion data using a combination of the Character Face settings, Actor Face settings, and the Voice device.
To create facial animation, you must create shapes on your character head models, then map those shapes to MotionBuilder’s pre-defined expressions.
Once you have a head model with shapes set up, there are three main workflows possible when animating character faces: