Animating Facial Expressions

I need some help here. Recently I have seen animations that have facial expressions in them. Eyelids opening and closing, mouth opening and closing or smiling. Tongues sticking out etc.

These are not the animations from the stock animations in the create gesture functionality but rather as part of custom animations in animation balls.

I recently purchased Poser 5 and from what I can gather you can only use poser 2 models to create animations for SL. BUT there are no capabilities for animating the face in Poser 2 models. Sooooooo can someone tell me in detailed steps/techniques how to do facial animations as part of custom animations??? Any help would be appreciated.

Thanks!

Chilly

The ones that are being used in some balls are scripted..using the LL base animations like WOW and Belly Laugh. You cannot animate the face or fingers.

We do not currently have the ability to animate the facial expresisons of the avatars directly. The way to achieve the results is to upload a pose with no keyframe data for the head itself, then to play another animation at the same time as the pose itself using a script- for example, the built in laugh or surprise animation. This can often give the desired effect. We do have some ability to specify a facial animation for an uploaded animation, but it is not very effective at achieving what you are looking for.

I keep seeing it mentioned that people can not use Poser 4/5 models. This isn't true. You are not limited to Poser 2 models. I use the Poser 4 model as the default for all my animations.

The biggest trick is to lock the hand parts and be careful not to grab toes or eyes.

I've had limited success setting a facial expression when uploading. During the upload you have the option of setting an expression at the same time you set the priority but this doesn't work well for a persistant expression (sort of a one off deal).

~Tao Zaius

What do you mean by:
"lock the hand parts and be careful not to grab toes or eyes. "

if you can't move ( I guess you wouldgra toes tomove them) toes...wouldn't that stop you from animating the legs for example?
Lock Hands?

The toes are a separate "bone" in the newer Poser models...they all five curl and uncurl together (I think some DAZ models have the ability to move the big toe on each foot separately, using an add-in feature called an "injection morph," but DAZ models are useless in SL.)

Locking the hands inhibits any changes in the hands from the wrists down to the fingertips.

= danny d.

whenever i export a pose from poser4 and try to upload it into sl, it says there isnt an animations, am i saving/doing something wrong in poser?

Make sure your first key frame is in the default position. SL will dump that frame but it uses it as reference. Also you'll need 2 other key frames in the animation, I can't remember the minimum you might can get away with 1 but seems like I tried that and it failed.

I have been able to upload and use 2 frame animations for still poses just recently. 1 key frame for the default and one for the pose itself. I am still new to the animations and SL in general but I beleive all you need is a total of 2 frames for an "animation".







<Just noticed the date on this post.. sorry yal>LOL

AS this thread is almost 5 years old, has anything changed related to creating custom facial animations ?

Is it possible ?

If so, how ?

Any links to get the full infos on how ?

Nope. Very little has changed since 2004.