Choosing shapes to create

The shapes you need to create depend on the method you plan to use to animate your head model.

For example, if you want your head model to be connected to a live performer, you must create shapes that match the Generic expressions in the Actor face. If you want your head model to be connected to the Voice device, you need to create shapes that match phonemes. These shapes are referred to as voice shapes.

The types of shapes that you can create are divided into the following categories:

• Rest Pose, which is the expression of your model at rest.
• Generic shapes, which are basic facial expressions that let you use motion capture data to drive facial animation.
• Phoneme shapes, which are basic mouth shapes that let you use audio files and the Voice device to drive facial animation.
• Cluster shapes, which let you create shapes for models with clusters.

You are not restricted to creating shapes that match only the generic and voice shapes, you can create any shape that you want. Once you create all your shapes, you are ready to export your model(s) to MotionBuilder.