Votes
5
Product:
Character Creator 4
Version:
4.0
Status:
Active
Issue 8542
Automatically generate a copy of project to be used to create a breathing ‘morph’
Breathing is fundamental in giving life to a character and because of this it should be a normal feature of iClone/CC. It is beyond me why this is not so. Currently for us to make an avatar breathe we need to create a second version with sliders set in different positions to the original. This becomes a target so we then have to link to it and it is not 100% perfect or very easy to vary. It is a time consuming distraction for something that should be normal. I see no reason why this stage - and beyond - could not be automated and be a permanent fixture. With AI doing it there is no need for a second avatar, just a virtual clone in code. So, when a character is created with a chest depth of 05 the code version simply has that as 100. Anything to do with breathing - chest, shoulders etc would have a slider up to 100, though that number would never be needed. This, like blinking, could operate from the very start: it is set to a default so on every 100 frames the slider is 0, then 30, then 0 then 30 etc which would give a gentle rhythm. Then when we want the avatar to, lets say talk, we go to the Breathe or Clone tab in Motion or some other place (python?), hit Breathe and the sliders pop up, maybe with a menu with default settings for common actions. Just before speech, on the correct frame hit ‘draw in’ and certain sliders would automatically move and then, in between sentences hit ‘take a breath’ and at speaking end, hit ‘exhale’ to return to normal. Or we hit ‘heavy’ or ‘panting’ or ‘gasping’, whatever. In it’s simplest form all that is needed is AI to automatically generate a copy of the project - including cloth - that displays as an array of sliders that are easy to access and record on its own track on the timeline.
OS: Windows 10
  •  1
  •  475
SuggestionPythonMorphAnimation
Submitted byesemgee May 25, 2022
1
COMMENTS (1)
Ascensi Aug 4, 2022 
If you want realism, the native character physics maybe getting an update to allow users to control breathing, hopefully via Sept update. When a character has proper physics enabled, the relaxed state is the mesh fatty areas will droop unless someone created/used muscles that can be controlled/tightened as simply as animating the brightness and or contrast of a physics texture. I've shared some recommendations such as using a similar texture control method used in the SSS shader except it will be a muscle/breathing system. 

Since they've already created the texture manipulation infrastructure for SSS, it should be a fairly simple system to adopt to the physics textures and controlling various muscle groups via RGBA maps (different muscles get different map/muscle colors to control them independently.

Also if someone uses cloth, they don't need to use tessellation because cloth already increases resolution - a bit of a bonus to get realism out of characters and keeping good performance.
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