LipService 3d facial sculpting and animation plugin and standalone for lightwave. 

LipServiceTM    
(C)opyright 1999 Joseph Alter, Inc. All Rights Reserved

A few words on interpolation here.

People who've used 'Blender','Gizmo', or 'MagpiePRO' are used to morphing from shape to shape. They're also used to doing lots of work with the graph editor easing in and out of these shapes to make them look more natural in motion. The underlying problem here is that morphs are linear. This means the points move from a to b then b to c then c to d. You can ease in and out of these moves with a graph editor, but the points themselves are still moving in a line. Your desire to ease them in and out comes from the fact that you can't just go a to b to c to d smoothly.

LipService actually constructs a motion spline through each vertex of each target. This means that if you just go ahead and lay the targets down on the time line, you'll be amazed to find that the desire to go in and tweak a motion graph is gone. The interpolation that LipService provides is non-linear and has built into it all the accelerations and velocity changes that you want from a face just by it's very nature.

The kinds of velocity changes that are going on are far more complex (because they vary from vertex to vertex) than you could ever constuct with a graph editor that operates on the whole target at once.

The subtlety that's going on with LipService's interpolations may not look like much when played back on your untextured geometry, but go ahead and render. There's alot going on there that the viewer's eye is definitely going to pick up in the final animation.

Go ahead and click on the above image to be taken to Jamie Lloyd's "Lightnin'". Take a good look at how 'fleshy' the face appears to be when it moves. All the compressibility that's going on. How complex and natural the motion feels. Sure, Jamie's one heck of an animator, but LipService can take some of the credit too. You just can't get that kind of motion from a morph, it's simply not possible.

LipService has it's own interpolation engine (inside the LW displacement filter), it doesn't rely on Blender, or Gizmo to do the interpolations. Quality animation isn't just a matter of placing keys, its what happens on all the other frames inbetween. LipService's interpolation is way superior to LW's, and makes for much more complex, natural movement.

Jamie did the facial animation for this piece in about half a day as his first ever LipService project, including sculpting many of the poses in LipService.



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