Tutorial 3 - Head Morph

In this tutorial, we learnt how to animate a human head realistically.

The first step I took was to download the human head object which was already uploaded on my tutor's blog. The image below shows the head imported into 3D Studio Max.

I then created 3 copies of the head which I had to make adjustments to. These would then be implemented in the animation. In the image below, you can see that the first head has had it's mouth widened, the second head has his eyebrow raised and the third head is like the original.

I then decided to try and implement blinking into the animation. This involved converting the head to an editable poly and adjusting the edges and polygons to make the eye lid come down over the eye. This was quite difficult to do because the eye is curved so it meant that the x co-ordinates needed to be modified. The image below shows the head with the eyes shut.

The original model was then Turbo Smoothed and key frames were added to the timeline in order to create the animation. Using the morph tool, I selected the expressions that I wanted to animate and added them to the channel list. These could then be adjusted to different amounts during the animation.