Out of Milk - Shape Key for Breathing
Greetings SizeCitizens, SizeSerfs and SizePeasants!
One thing that I was missing in the toolset for animating people is breathing. Blinking, facial expressions and lip syncing are all very useful, but breathing can really help elevate a shot and make a character feel much more human.
Sadly, there isn't anything built into the conversion and rigging toolkit I currently use, so I built one myself. It's a shapekey in blender, controlled by a specific bone in the rig, that I linked using driers, and then I copy the shapekey across to any clothing that the character wears so that it's all controlled by the same thing.
It took me a second to figure out how to properly link them up, but I'm pleased with how this looks! I think when combined with mocap and facial animation, it should help make shots look that extra bit more immersive!
Thanks,
SizeKing.
Comments (4)
Superb work on the details! The likes of this or tighter/shorter clothes after a growth turn a good clip into an impressive ones.
I think it looks great!! The one thing is that, to me, it looks quite slow?? (Which I get could be intentional in just a test rigging!!) I like to do that kinda subconscious thing when watching a show/movie where if a character is underwater I hold my breath until the resurface. And I tried matching my breath to this clip, and holy cow my lungs ached lol. But nonetheless!! The breathing does make it feel less static and gives a nice natural feel to it!
That's totally fair, I didn't time the keyframes between breathing the way I would do with motion capture, it was mostly arbitrary >.< I think you'll be happy to know that when I implement this in tandem with motion capture, it will definitely be more realistically timed haha
This is subtle and very very cool