Animating Facial Features & Expressions, Second Edition (Charles River Media Graphics)

This completely updated edition is written to teach 3D artists, designers, and animators how to add realism to their character's expressions. It begins by covering the anatomy of the human head, facial features, and facial muscles and progresses to cover recreating the human face and muscle structure in 3D and making it move in a realistic, believable fashion. It is filled with detailed instruction for lip synching and creating visual expressions for speech and sound under a variety of conditions (sad, happy, stuttering, etc.). It provides visual reference charts of morph targets for weighted human expressions, typical human phonemes, cartoon expressions, facial expressions, and just-for-fun cartoon expressions. This edition includes two new chapters covering 3ds Max and Maya. All of these techniques can also be applied to your own aliens, animals, creatures, and other animated creations. If you want your characters to have truly realistic facial expressions, you'll learn everything you need to know in this indispensable resource.