Question How to make one person's head follow another's?

[SlimerJSpud]

I'm looking for a simple way to make one person's head follow another person's head. If you have one person in a conversation who's a little animated, and the other stands there like a statue, it's a bit odd. I know about eye control, but I'd like to have one person's head turn to follow another's around. Thanks.

 

[DTB247]

Life by MacGruber should do the trick adds breathing as bonus.

 

[SlimerJSpud]

I've been trying this one:

Plugins - E-Motion

E-Motion is a mammoth personality plugin to give life to your VAM characters and allow you to interact with them in realtime! E-Motion + Glance on a MOCAP by VAMTimbo E-Motion with head tracking + Glance The main purpose of E-Motion is to...

hub.virtamate.com

 

[Nameless Vagabond]

MacGruber's Gaze plugin does exactly what you are describing. It is part of his Life package

Plugins - Life

Life is a collection of plugins intended to essentially awake a character, let him/her come to life. Central part so far is the audio-synchronized breathing, which can be used to drive complex animations. The Version 13 update helps with making...

hub.virtamate.com

 

[SlimerJSpud]

I can't use the audio-synchronized breathing part, because the breathing is already controlled by something else. When they fight, it's not pretty.

 

[DTB247]

You should be able to load gaze on it's own without the breathing .

 

[SlimerJSpud]

I'll try Gaze. The E-motion plugin seems to produce some random head swiveling towards nothing.

 

[Empathion]

If the talker is moving the head around alot then you can use https://hub.virtamate.com/resources/searchlight.14512/ to make the listener`s head point towards the other. If the movement is subtle then there`s that much "life" added in.

 

[SlimerJSpud]

I'm not so sure searchlight is the best way. It looks like it points a whole atom towards something, which could be a person's head, but I don't want the whole person pointing towards the other person. The animation needs to do that.

 

[MacGruber]

Besides Gaze (from my Life package) for Head rotation and of course Glance (by AcidBubbles) for eye movement, you may also want to have a look at my IdlePoser. It has this "Anchor" feature, which is kind of a "soft-parenting to up to 2 objects", but for each individual control node and state. You could for example create an animation that has one character move from their hand from their own hip (100% anchor to own hip) to the cheek of another character (100% anchor to target character's head), with a control point in between (e.g. 40% anchor to own hip and 60% anchor to target character chest). That gives you a smooth animation for the hand, despite both characters doing other independent animations for other body parts simultaneously.

 

[SlimerJSpud]

Yeah, I thought about Idle Poser. It's complicated. It looks like it has all the things I'd like to do, but there's that learning curve. I'll get there at some point!

 

[MacGruber]

but there's that learning curve.

Yes, sadly there is. Never had the time to make a proper tutorial vid for it.

 

[SlimerJSpud]

"Welcome to the first tutorial for Idle Poser. Please take a seat."