3D FACIAL EXPRESSION

Whether humanizing realistic digital doubles, or dramatizing toon/stylized characters; iClone provides time-saving tools that can help anyone direct their 3D actors' facial performances to the highest productivity.

Face Puppeteering

Face Key Editing

Character-centric Timeline

Pro-level Curve Editing

Look-at Constraints  v8.2

Dynamic Wrinkles  v8.2

ENGAGING LOOK-AT CONSTRAINTS  New in v8.2

  • Eye-Driven Facial Morphs
  • Eyes-Neck-Torso Weight
  • Levels of Engagement

Morphs & Wrinkles Actuate with Eye Movement

  • Simulate natural awareness to an object or maintain eye contact to the camera.
  • Eyelids and eyebrows naturally move with the eyeballs when the character is looking around. Automatic asymmetry helps to overcome the uncanny valley.
  • Subtle wrinkles are triggered around the eyes and forehead for all types of facial expressions like frowns and smirks.

Eye-Neck-Torso Weight

  • Adjustable look-at constraint ratio between the eyes, neck, and torso can alter the actor’s mannerism.
  • Enhanced morph shapes for head up and down movements.

Keyable Engagement Levels

  • Choose between different engagement levels from quick glances to intense gazes.
  • Recruit the correct body parts to sell the motion, from isolated eye movements to the coordination with the rest of the body.
  • Set keys to alternate the eye, neck, and torso engagement ranges.

MOUSE PUPPETEERING WITH PERSONA FACIAL PROFILES

Easily start with 11 functional puppet profiles each governing dedicated puppetting range. Users can selectively layer (create, blend or overwrite) puppet features to complete a full facial animation. Four dedicated character profiles showcase distinctive emotions and personalities, each for the CC4 avatars - Kevin, Camila, and for Humanoids - Coyote and T-REX.

FACE KEY EDITING TO FINE-TUNE FEATURE DETAILS

Once you have created facial expressions through lipsyncing, facial mocap or puppeteering, then you can fine-tune feature details by using the Face Key Editor. These facial keys will be overlaid and blended with existing expressions and stored in the Timeline track for further editing.

  • Muscle Panel
  • Expression Presets
  • Morph Slider
  • Scalable Expression
Muscle Panel
  • Mouse drag to drive the corresponding muscle movement along eyelids, eyes, brows, cheeks, mouth, lips, and nasal area.
  • Options for Symmetry and associated Head Rotation.
  • Adjustable expressiveness to accommodate subtle to drastic manipulations.
  • Additional muscle controls for characters with 140+ Extended Facial Profile, other than more secondary menus for lips, eyes, tongue, and four extra controls for Eyelash, Eyeball (pupil), Neck and Ears are supported.
Expression Presets
  • Extensive click-to-apply expression library categorized in emotional states - happy, sad, angry, disgust, fear, and surprise, with expressive level adjustment.
  • Facial parts can be used for combining expression from different facial area.
  • Additional tongue pose and FACS are also available.
Morph Slider

Through Morph Sliders, directly access 60+ Standard or 140+ Extended blendshapes. There are several unique values of using morphs sliders giveing complete control over expression details; allowing input of extrapolated strength values (+/- 200 ); observe what blendshapes are being triggered through the Muscle Panel and Expression Presets. Furthermore, keyword search custom target morphs and actually see the blendshape names and values when exporting to external 3D tools.

Flexible Upgrade and Downgrade

Designers can easily upgrade or downgrade from 60 to 140 blendshapes in their actors’ expression details when a certain level of export is required with Character Creator’s scalable expression system.
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CHARACTER-CENTRIC TIMELINE TRACKS

Designers can easily upgrade or downgrade from 60 to 140 blendshapes in their actors’ expression details when a certain level of export is required with Character Creator’s scalable expression system.

Basic Level (4)

  • Major logical facial parts

Feature Level (16)

  • All facial features

Morph Level (63+/150+)

  • All the expression morphs:
    • 63+ for Standard profile
    • 150+ for Extended profile

PRO-LEVEL CURVE EDITING

Creating Cartoon Performances

  • Adapt all the skills of classic animation training to your iClone animations. Select a section of motion keys from the timeline and start applying curves to achieve the level-up performance.
  • Exercise full control over time and space adjustments. Create stepped, exaggerated follow through, and more for cartoon animation.

Exaggerated Follow Through

  • Offset the timing of different facial morphs to achieve a morph-level facial follow through effect.

EXQUISITE EXPRESSIONS WITH DYNAMIC WRINKLES   New in iC8.2 & CC4.2

The Wrinkle System is highly customizable and can simulate exceptional facial expression details in real-time. It can upgrade your CC characters and redefine the realism of their talking facial features by triggering dynamic wrinkles through any facial movement.

  • Customizable Settings
  • Reactive Wrinkles
  • Universally Compatible

Custom Wrinkle Settings

  • Expression Wrinkles are divided into 13 common facial regions that govern the wrinkle lines, crows feet, smile lines, and more.
  • Intensify or neutralize any target region of the face, down to the individual channel map like Normals, AO, and Redness.
  • Alter the Rate of Appearance to delay or preempt the micro-movements of the fasciae while the expression-driven muscles are flexed.

Reactive Expression Wrinkles

Upon activation, the expression wrinkles are synchronized with the facial movements that are triggered by a range of animation tools in iClone, including Face Key Editor, Face Puppet, Look-at Constraints, as well as features such as Lip-sync and Facial Mocap.

Works with Any CC Character

  • General Wrinkles can be applied to any CC3+ character, naturally blended with different skin tones, and compatible with CC SkinGen.
  • The CC Wrinkle shader supports high-res multi-texture blending without compromising real-time performance.

AI FACIAL TRACKING ANIMATION WITH WEBCAM & RECORDED VIDEOS

AccuFACE plugin for iClone is an AI facial tracker powered by NVIDIA RTX GPU, capable of capturing facial expressions from both webcams and conventional video files. Smoothly synchronize facial movements with voice input. It also fine-tunes lip and tongue articulation using proprietary AccuLIPS technology.

BELIEVABLE TALKING ANIMATION FROM ACCURATE LIPSYNC

iClone provides the most intuitive way to generate procedural, editable lipsyncing animations, allows all types of easily created Accurate, Natural, and Smooth talking performances.   

facial expression animation tool - iclone

Precision Facial Animation with iPhone Motion Capture

The highly expressive, scan-based ExPlus blendshapes are now one-to-one mapped to iPhone ARKit signals, making the data ready for post layer editing via the iClone Face Puppet and Face Key Editor.   

facial expression animation tool - iphone face mocap

ESSENTIAL EXPRESSION ASSETS