First post, first creature

This is the video that started it all.
Talking Face Capture
http://youtu.be/c3q6Eeq4RZI
Armed with Lightwave, NevronMotion, and XBox Kinect and a zBrush sculpt started in 2006, I thought I would give Lightwave’s new Nevron face capture a try.

Once I got over the initial learning curve, the idea of adding ‘traits’ to motion curves of morph maps seemed to sit well in my head, and after reading the docs Kinect SDK:-http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/jj130970.aspx (ESPECIALLY the explanation of the animation units AU at the bottom of the page) I realized that the Kinect capture part of Nevron is basically a wrapper around the common outputs of the Kinect SDK.

With that in mind designing morph maps for use with Nevron is fairly straightforward. In zBrush using morph targets, moveTopological brush, morph brush and inflate to quickly hash out basic morph using GOZ is a breeze

The first thing was to construct a skull to use as a guide for the morphs. This was basically a sphere created in Lughtwave’s modeler that I used the new shrinkwrap tool to expand to almost touch the base mesh. I brought this into zBrush, turned on dynamesh and quickly roughed out a skull. With this in the background it was easy to see where needed more inflating to keep the volume of the face.