Simulation For Facial Animation

[@PierrickPicaut_P2DESIGN]

Very iumpressive, well explained and inspiring!

[@markduv]

Glad you liked it!

[@learner6010]

You pierick bro you are blender user and i see your videos also. Do you still use ziva?

[@JoshHatton-w4z]

Slick rig! A lot of nice features, and I like the approach to try to get simulated face but more stable with less overhead.

[@markduv]

Thanks! It is quite stable and solves pretty quickly, especially for how much it adds to the look.

[@haitiansensation4439]

you are a ziva vfx pioneer. I truly wish one day to to be capable of a small percentage of what you're able to do

[@beatboxbuynsanjaa]

This is awesome. Avatar 2 VFX supervisor talked about this at Corridor Crew interview. They said their characters doesn't have blend shapes and everything is simulation and raw mocap data drives and simulation. This is just perfect

[@markduv]

While this implementation wasn't ment to be driven by mocap, setting something up wouldn't be too difficult. Thanks for watching!

[@beatboxbuynsanjaa]

@@markduvI still making blendshape rigs. but simulation based face and maybe body rig too is gonna be road to future. Only thing to make things better is AI physics for animation system like Cascadeur. If maya implement that. Thats gonna be great

[@gilmenel]

This is awesome. I helped create ZivaVFX, and this is the best facial rig I've ever seen someone make with it.

[@markduv]

It's actually quite reliable and holds up to quite a bit of punishment (both the rig and Ziva). It's pretty cool how much you can do that'd usually take someone substantial amounts of time to sculpt one-off for a shot. Thanks for your dev time you've put into the tool!👍

[@araviaravind9650]

at 4:08 , you break the face into separate parts and converting them into tissues later , but how do u make the tissues drive the face geo (the original face mesh), are you doing a fascia sim on top (like they do it for body ) ,or are you driving the face geo with the underlying tissues with the use of shrinkwrap? or are you using blendshapes from the tissues , to drive the face geo? (but in that case the vertex order has to be the same right?) and are you blending between the sim and the animation animated using blendshapes alone by animators?

[@markduv]

No fascia type sim is necessary. In a typical muscle pipeline, fascia is usually used to create skin slide as the underlying shapes deform... In this case, the tissues themselves are the combination of muscle and skin (you really wouldn't want features sliding around the face), so it's (mostly) using a wrap deformer to transfer the tissue motion back to the original face geo. I am doing targeted fascia/wrinkle-type cloth sims for some patches, like the forehead wrinkles. I created blendshapes for the anim rig by using the output of the simulation... so when they trigger a "eyebrow_up" on the anim rig, it re-simulates that same pull on the tissue in characterFX combining it with the rest of the performance. In my experience it's a the blendshape anim preview does quite a decent job at replicating the final output.

[@araviaravind9650]

@ thanks for clarifying that! I hope to see more of your work in the future.

[@markduv]

You will, I've been trying to not spoil the story of the animated short too much by showing some of the current work.

[@MonopidosTodoSobreTodo]

WOW, it's impressive, I'd love to see the procedure on how to create a simulation like this from scratch, facial or not, it would be great as a tutorial :D.

[@markduv]

Thank you! I'll think about that...

[@amoramoruu]

Ziva doesn't support selling their product anymore. So, I cannot open your downloadable file. How can I follow your tutorial with some examples? or Where can I get the example 3D stylized face model? Thank you for the amazing video!

[@C_Corpze]

Mind blowing, I didn't know skin and muscles could be simulated so quickly and realistically in 3D software. I'd imagine it still requires a very powerful computer though? I wonder if something similar is possible to do in Blender since that's what I use. By the looks of it it does seem like the entire skeleton was modeled as well but that seems very time consuming for some wrinkles and details you practically only see from up close. But I am still really impressed by how amazing it looks.

[@markduv]

My computer isn't the newest but it's decent and it pumps out the sim pass during my lunch break. Ziva's computation time varies as it depends on your settings, but it's fast enough especially for how good it looks. I don't believe Blender has an FEM tissue solver, the other main one out there is Houdini... pretty sure this would work with Houdini as well, it's just a little slower (in my experience).

[@lightningkitten]

this is fascinating

[@markduv]

Yeah, it's a little different then it's been done before.

[@HaonanHe-ep5vs]

Amazing! How can I make the slap face animation shown in the video?

[@TheHighFlys]

PLEASE more Ziva tutorials!

[@markduv]

What kind of Ziva tutorials would you like see?

[@TheHighFlys]

@@markduvSubbed! Never got this notification! Could you PLEASE do a full Ziva beginner to intermediate series where someone literally just opening Ziva to knowing how to start doing these full face rigs and other things like that, I'd genuinely kill for that.

[@markduv]

Ok. The content of my channel has been mainly things that I've been doing anyways for this short film. I'll keep this in mind though... Any thanks if I do decide to do it should be a little less homicide-y. lol

[@noiryork101]

It´s amazing!

[@masterplayer5982]

I’m not the only one who thinks the thumbnail looks like billy from adventure time, right?

[@markduv]

He'd need FAR more hair. lol

[@LordLuigi_Rigs]

I like this!

[@markduv]

The crazy thing is I was just thinking of how much I liked you LordLuigiRigs! Thank you!

[@ikibir]

Gorgeous work!! I doubt this would be feasible for a game engine to digest. especially with more then say 5 characters on screen (would be awesome in a game like Street fighter/Mortal Kombat so their faces would react better to the blows). But for pre-render, no one cares lol. Again, Beautifully done!

[@markduv]

Yes, this is more geared towards a cached geo to render type situation. The renderer could be realtime if that'd be your preference. Glad you liked it!

[@王高伟]

Hello, can you please give me a tutorial? I really like your assembly. It’s amazing.

[@한준호-c8d]

crazy

[@tedc1928]

Are you attaching ziva muscle to other muscles or are all the attachments to bone?

[@markduv]

I'm using attachments the same way a normal face uses real muscles. "Ziva Muscles" or Tissues is being pulled towards the bone or other tissues using attachments. Got it?

[@tedc1928]

at frame 4:25 the red attachment is tissue to tissue? Like the upper lip tissue is attached to the lower lip tissue? Is the ziva bones controlling all the movement?

[@markduv]

The red attachments you see there is both tissue to tissue and tissue to bone which does include the upperlip to the lowerlip. On frame 4:25 you can see red attachments floating outside the head that pull the dynamic tissue outward towards invisible bone objects to emulate a cheek puff.

[@jonstoll7108]

This is insane! how long would this take to to setup for a new character. With a proper skull and basemesh for the Head?

[@markduv]

It took a while to develop this version 1 because everything was done "by hand" on a limited home machines, but it really wouldn't take that long to implement it on scale and flexible for a variety of face types. The actual time to model the tissues was negligible and would be even simpler on face with less defined creases (and by that I mean the lines in the face, specific to the look I'm going for with this short), like a realistic face. There are some simple tools I'd want to develop to make mass character creation easier if I was going to implement this at a VFX/animation house. Glad you liked it!

[@thana3270]

Wait hold up You can animate a mesh and apply ziva dynamics simulations over it? But how? Doesn't ziva only allow you to animate bones then ziva does all the muscle and skin simulation?

[@markduv]

The mesh you're animating is just a preview of a set of values... Aka, pulling the BrowUp control to 50% shows you a preview of what that'd look like simulated. After caching out the animation of the entire set of values the simulation pulls the tissues BrowUp to 50% recreating the pose you choose. This makes each animation completely original and able to be acted upon by forces other then the animation. Did that answer it for you?

[@thana3270]

@@markduv So the BrowUp control you are speaking of, is that a control for the regular face rig (bones, skinning)? Or is it a point on the mesh which the tissue is attached to? Also, is there some sort of tutorial on Ziva's website that shows how to do this? And thank you very much for taking the time to respond to comments, you don't see that very often :)

[@markduv]

The "BrowUp" control was just an hypothetical example... My controls (you see in the anim rig portion of the vid) are made of small NURBS surfaces that you translate which becomes the value you pass on to the simulation. There has been some use of Ziva to do facial, but it was much more like my old version I talk about in the video. You can find examples of that one. This particual setup is different... Don't really think there's anything out there besides this vid. Happy to talk to you!

[@thana3270]

@@markduv Alright I understand the setup now, thank you so much for clarifying :)

[@markduv]

Sweet.

[@kindkind4813]

Hello my friend. tutorial pls?❤

[@macitseferi1843]

can i equip my own character using only download file and maya ?

[@markduv]

No... you'd need to get the plugin Ziva. Then use the theory of what's in the download example to make you're own.

[@macitseferi1843]

@@markduv I don't have enough knowledge to get into such a complex cycle for the moment, but if someone who has mastered the whole process publishes a comprehensive tutorial, I will knock on the door again.

[@markduv]

Ok, cool. Yeah, just keep moving forward and learning... you'll get there!