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Thursday, January 4, 2007

Tips & Techniques: Creating a Closed Mouth Character from an Open Mouth Photo

Ok, so now you know how cool iClone is, with all it's great features for 3d Real-Time Filmmaking. And you know how simple it is to take a photo of someone, and turn them into a 3d character. Well most people use photos of folks with closed mouths. Yes, this is ideal. However, what if there is a great high resolution photo (high-res: a must BTW) that you've found, but the person in the photo has their mouth open? Very easy to fix this. Look at the photo above. The first face on the left side, is a front view photo of a girl with her mouth open. After you've sized up the points in the LOAD IMAGE mode, and then SAVED the face, go to TOOLS, ... TEXTURE, ...and use the SMUDGE TOOL (that's the little hand with the pointed finger) to carefully smudge the bottom lip up towards the top lip, in turn, closing the mouth as much as possible (shown in the Middle image above). After that, click on the SMOOTH tool (the one that likes like a teardrop) and click along the smudged section until it blends in with the face nicely (Seen in the extreme right face above), and presto, a face with it's mouth closed which you can use beautifully in iClone! And by the way, if you don't want the chin to look as big as my creation above, simply bring the FACE FITTERS ever so slightly under the bottom lip of the opened mouth face you're working on, so that when you fix the mouth later, the chin looks more natural. Hope this tip helps you.
Till Next Time, ... "Keep Cloning" ..... Pauly