Facial Expression Questions

[IshikaruTanaka]

I need help with a couple of things.

1. The Deliverance expression sticker doesn't let you operate mouth corners individually. It's either all smile or all frown. How do we manage to make expressions like a smirk or a half-smile?

2. Is there a way to create a "reset" action inside of a facial expression set you're building, that interrupts whatever long action is currently playing and sets the expression back to basic avatar expression?

Thanks for any help on these!

[DimitriX89]

The default head contains all the required morphs, including one side specific expressions, such as mouth.GrinLeft.Exclusive Deliverance animator must've omitted them for simplicity's sake. You can open your *.xpf file in the notepad and manually change the names of individual animation tracks (like, mouth.Grin.Exclusive to mouth.GrinLeft.Exclusive), so your animation can affect those half-morphs instead of full-morphs. This article has a list of facial morph names: http://www.imvu.com/creators/education_ ... id=2225221 It still might not work with all heads since custom-made head meshes might not possess full list of morphs either. Because of creator's lasiness or optimisation concerns.

What about your second question, no there is no option to abort currently executed animation in IMVU, you can only only replace it with something else. The best bet is to create the *.xpf that is animated in the similar way as default head expression, put it into trigger, then in Ensemble parameters (*.xpf related part) set Blend Weight to some high number (100 or more). This way you can more or less override the underlying animation; high Blend Weight is the key, otherwise two animations will just mix.

[IshikaruTanaka]

Thank you so much for your advice. I'm going to try your ideas and see what I come up with. Thankfully, the expressions I'm trying to create will go on one commonly-derived head I prefer so I'll always be able to have them work well, since I'll be using the derivable head base to make them and using heads almost exclusively derived from that head base.

I may post again as I'm having trouble with facial expressions and eyebrows related to the particular head I'm using. But thanks again!

[Elaini]

The default head has all the basic morphs and some cartoony or goofy ones besides that, yes. But I cannot really say that they're the most realistic or natural ones. But that's a problem for the head meshers to solve.