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

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

I was saying a little earlier, a key part of LipService's power is the fact that sculpting tools are built into the animation process. They're not modeling tools, for creating/deleting geometry, but sculpting tools. They're there for you to tweak your model while animating.

Magnet tools include 'translate', 'inflate', 'smooth' and 'to neutral'. You'll be very surprised how much you can get done with these simple, very powerful and natural tools. Additionally 'performance groups' can be used as a sculpting tool as well (I frequently do). If you want to build a phoneme that has some similarity to a few other phonemes, for example - put them in the group, wave the mouse around - and when you release, this blend is now your current model to go in and sculpt on.

When you select an area to operate on in LipService, it is a soft select which tapers out from the center of the selection. 'to neutral' sends the current soft select back towards the neutral position. How often have you had to be extra careful when mushing your model around the nose because you didn't wand it to 'float around' when you interpolated the targets? (real often if you've ever tried animating faces). Most people's solution to this problem is to just be real careful around the stiff cartilidge of the nose. With 'to neutral' you don't have to be careful, because you can always back off from your modeling changes local to a soft selection.

Or, what if you've modeled a smile and just want to make it a little assymetrical? Just select one side of the mouth and swish the 'to neutral' tool a little.

The 'smooth' function is basically a 3d 'soften' brush. Smooth out creases for instance. Or, let's say you've opened up the mouth by rotating the jaw, but now the polys in the cheeks are all stretched wierd. Use the smooth tool to squeeze them back together (locally).

Another important thing to remember here. The work area is just your scratchpad when modeling, it doesn't actually change any animation untill you 'put' it into a cell. You do this by clicking on the little arrow on the cell that's facing right ('>'). Conversely, if you'd like to 'get' a model from one of the cells, click on the arrow that's facing left ('<').

Any time you make a change to a cell, all you need do is play the animation to see how you've changed things.


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