Morph Stuff

I wanted my character to have as much expression's as possible, to meet the criteria of the module. But the only way I knew how was to use key framing and then move the vertex points around, but I did not want to do this as it could cause allot of problems.

As you start to edit the vertex points you are essentially are moving the mold of the entire face and parts. Now if you are not careful too much editing will ruin the model you have spent so much time and effort on. (And we know we don't want that.)

So I did some research and found out that there is a modifier called the "Morph" which allows you to create copies of your model and change them. Then you can use sliders to change your original model but you can always lower the sliders to get back to your original state.









































You can see from the images above, I created many copies of my characters body ( I had to use the whole body as the head is attached to the body and you cannot chop the head of and just use that.) Now all the morphs have to be made before you skin the model, otherwise it will mess it up.

This was tricky and required allot of planning as I had to work out the best morphs for what exspression I was going to be using, I covered the basics of happy, sad, mad etc and also added in some subtle mouth movements and eye movements. (Also the advanage to this is that you can use each one at the same time as another, so you can use say eye gestures and mix them with mouth ones, enabling you to create hundreds of diffrent looks from a small amount of designs.)






The video above is a test of all the gestures one after the other, I know it looks rather crazy but its just to see how the face reacts to each one. Some are very over the top than others and all this can be fine tuned later on. (But I am glad that I used the morph tool, as it works really well!!)