When opening a production it’s a high-quality idea to sit
down with the director and animators and choose on a list of morphs general to
every character. While certain characters may want exclusive morphs, having a
common morph list helps continuity and makes the animator’s job much easier.
Over time I’ve developed a basic morph list that I use as an
opening point for all my characters. These morphs provide for all of the
fundamental emotions and mouth shapes necessary to generate convincing facial
animation. Feel free to add a few more morphs to the list for your own
manufacture to add nuance or variety, but before you do, try to make the
required expression using these morphs opening, just adding a new morph if the
expression is not possible using the fundamental morphs.
The fundamental morph list is shown here using Hamish as the
instance. When we look at the morphs in more detail later in this part, each
one is shown with many character examples.
While it’s not forever necessary for easy animation, the
morphs listed with (LR) next to them can have the left and right sides
separated into additional morphs for better variety of expression. By including
the left and right separations you can achieve asymmetrical facial animation, giving
much extra personality and liveliness to your characters.
So let’s take a look at each of these morphs in extra
detail, then we’ll go ahead and make the morphs for Hamish.
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