VaM 1.x Animating expression morphs

[rokoc]

I know it's been done to death but it's not so much of a how to animate them but more the methods people use.

I've got randomly looped main sex animations in timeline.

For facial expressions I'm messing around with them as a layer in timeliness and I'm not completely sold on how to approach. do I loop the expressions or do I not loop them. playing around with blend times etc. do you start each expression the same then animate or start each animation as a different expression and let blend deal with it. how long for each animation ? I'm currently doing 2s

I've tried most of that and it's passable but not great since the main animation is random.

I like to keep plugins to a minimum or lightweight and don't get on well with the various emotion/expression plugins.

Just about to start trying with a distance comparison plugin and animate the morphs that way as a sort of depth meter, pick random handpicked morph change its value based on depth value

If anyone's got any other tips/workflows etc I'd like to hear them

 

[atani]

This is an aspect I think it's never done to death because it's so difficult to make it good and varied/natural. A wrong or overdone expression can kill immersion in an heartbeat.

The best result is when you carefully match the expected expression to what is happening at the moment, but damn, that is a fuckton of work and it's set in stone. If I'm making a scene I would like to use it later on too, and if I know exactly what and when a certain expression will happen, the interest in the scene is lower each time I play it. For this reason, my balance point is in randomisation with the con of having sometimes a wrong or weird result at moments, but the overall experience is compensated by feeling more fresh. I think that is the same kind of balance you are looking for.
Just a note that this is for using during sex animations, while a story animation I would do more a more rigid expression work.

In my randomisation of expressions in sex animations, I prefer using a separate Timeline plugin from the body animations as it gives me more flexibility to experiment and mix. Another reason is that if I decide on the moment to use some kind of plugin to do expressions instead of my sets, disabling that separate Timeline plugin would not affect the animations or need to redo a lot of the scene structure. It's one more timeline plugin in the plugins list but gives you a lot of freedom.
On that timeline, I pick a bunch of expressions as targets that I think portray a good range of expressions. I then make one animation for each of the targets to be the main target in use (not 0), sometimes with a smidge of another one, AND:

• randomise to *
• 1 second animation time
• random loop 1-3 plays
• blend in time about 3 seconds (longer than the animation so that all blend the blendings)

As an extra, I also use a logicbrick random value brick to change Timeline speed to 0.5-3 or so to give even more randomness in the output. Possibly also do a random weight value too, I don't recall well now, but this all gives very interesting blends and mixes.
Naturally, being random means that sometimes you get weird results but that's the price to pay for randomness.