Fix for tongue animations

[qoosh]

When a character has expressions that move the tongue in and out, the tongue usually goes through the lower jaw. Could there be a fix for this so that uncanny aspect is reduced or eliminated? It is the one thing that I cannot find a solution for yet. Does someone here know a morph or plugin to solve this?

 

[TToby]

Hi Qoosh.
The tongue is one of the most annoying and bugged things in VaM. This is not the fault of VaM directly, but of the original DAZ3d model. The tongue consists of approx 5 joints and bones and is prone to distortions from many morphs that alters the head or face. There are a lot of collision and physics issues with the tongue, we even got a button to switch off tongue collision completely. Using the tongue for animations was always a balancing act: you can even be happy if it somehow just works. With the whole VaM team working for V2.x, most probably there will not be any official solution for this anymore. If a clever plugin creator would come out with a bright solution, I would ask him "where have you been all the years before?".
Best workaround is IMHO to avoid critical tongue movement completely, or to open the mouth and raise the tongue a bit for animations. Though, the last one might be desturbed even by replacing your figure with a custom look.

There are AFAIK only some few plugins touching this sensitive issue:
This one gives you some more control over the tongue especially while doing animations. Its worth giving it a try.

Plugins - TongueControl

Moving the tongue directly using the pose morphs can be a pain because when you move something you have to compensate it elsewhere to avoid glitches. This plugin aims to provide simpler controls to manipulate it by automatically compensate...

hub.virtamate.com

This one does crazy thngs wth the tongue physics, but it's paid stuff

Paid Plugins - Relax 👀- Life and Death - And everything between - New gaze, eyelid and morph engine!

https://www.miscreatedreality.com/relax This is probably among my most advanced plugins. I'm using this for all my videos to create life-like experiences. Haven't been updating the resource on the hub for a while. This is some of the changes...

hub.virtamate.com

There might be more...

 

[qoosh]

I think the issue I'm having is related mainly to the BreatheStandDeluxe plugin. It makes the tongue move automatically in and out. I like it and I want to keep that in the animation, but it also overrides the TongueControl plugin and other tongue morph controls and makes me unable to manually animate the tongue. There may be a way to have the mouth automatically expand to avoid tongue clipping, but I have yet to discover it. Maybe someone can develop a new plugin to help out with this.

 

[TToby]

Hi, I didn't had those informations when answering your question.
Otherwise, I would have suggested to just use an other of those many breathing plugins, which doesn't touch the tongue. Or, if you really like that special plugin, maybe you can take a deep look at the source code and remove or edit the lines which moves the tongue... it may be easier than you think. I can't see someone writing a plugin only to fix that broken plugin... would be easier to re-write it completely. But maybe I am wrong.

 

[qoosh]

Thanks, I'll see what I can do. But I hope that in VAM 2.X they will have better control of the tongue with the updated DAZ models. I see in the Alpha that finger controls are much more exact so hopefully this will extend to all parts of the body for a hyper real simulation.

 

[kollo]

I've had success using acidbubbles' collider editor plugin. The mouth, lip, and tongue colliders all need to be shrunk and moved around a bit.