Question Limit mouth animations in scenes?

[Allorhos]

Hi there! VaM newb here.

I finally overcame the first steep learning curve for the newcomers and learnt how to tinker around scenes, switching models and adding some plugins to improve my experience. Having a blast switching models into scenes. Even though I'm aware that this can break some animations when plugging in a model with different body proportions, there is something specific I would like to know if it can be fixed or, at least, mitigated.

I have some models based on characters that, by design, are not very expressive. When I put these into scenes with very expressive actors their mouth looks extremely weird and even glitches and ends up getting creepy. They smile "too much".

Even though I fear I know the answer to this question... Is there an "easy" way of mitigating that problem, somehow limiting how much a mouth can be animated in an already built scene?

Thanks in advance!

 

[Origin69]

It depends how the scene is made.

If the emotion morphs are part of a timeline animation, you can look at the timeline plugin and find the morphs that the creator used in the targets list. You could select the targets so that only the morphs you don't want show up on the top right list in the targets tab, and just remove them by clicking the [[+/-]add remove targets] button/ remove active targets. Or you can select a target and scrub through the animation jumping to the individual key frames with the [f>] button and turn them down a bit.

Here is the wiki for timeline.

Targets screen

Advanced and intuitive keyframe animations for Virt-A-Mate - acidbubbles/vam-timeline

github.com

 

[Anand]

I have some models based on characters that, by design, are not very expressive. When I put these into scenes with very expressive actors their mouth looks extremely weird and even glitches and ends up getting creepy. They smile "too much".

Greetz fellow newb. I feel your learning curve pain. Been there. Actually, still there.

If your issue is one of flappy lips, then this thread may help. cmramlow paid someone to write a VERY useful script called SoftPhysicsSelectorV2.cs that reduces lip glitches (I use this a lot).

LINK

If what you're referring to is the mouth stuck open or in a weird state, then Origin69's tips are on the money.

 

[Allorhos]

It depends how the scene is made.

If the emotion morphs are part of a timeline animation, you can look at the timeline plugin and find the morphs that the creator used in the targets list. You could select the targets so that only the morphs you don't want show up on the top right list in the targets tab, and just remove them by clicking the [[+/-]add remove targets] button/ remove active targets. Or you can select a target and scrub through the animation jumping to the individual key frames with the [f>] button and turn them down a bit.

Here is the wiki for timeline.

Targets screen

Advanced and intuitive keyframe animations for Virt-A-Mate - acidbubbles/vam-timeline

github.com

Thanks a lot! I'll take a look and see if I can at least mitigate the problem. If not, I guess I'll have to try some more rudimentary methods, like preapplying morphs somehow "opposite" to the ones applied in the scene to counter those facial expressions and see if that can fix something.

Greetz fellow newb. I feel your learning curve pain. Been there. Actually, still there.

If your issue is one of flappy lips, then this thread may help. cmramlow paid someone to write a VERY useful script called SoftPhysicsSelectorV2.cs that reduces lip glitches (I use this a lot).

LINK

If what you're referring to is the mouth stuck open or in a weird state, then Origin69's tips are on the money.

Well, to be honest I may have been a little bit too optimistic when I said that I overcame the learning curve

Unfortunately glitching is only a consequence of the original problem. Even if I avoided glitching, the models I use are not made to smile too much and look weird when plugged into a scene with a very "smiley" original actor, showing teeth and all that.