Animating Facial Features & Expressions

tons of information and easy to follow for people who sculpt or draw!!

This book clearly goes over all of the aspects needed for succesful facial animation. I was able to create phonemes for my 3d characters as well as a variety of facial expressions. After using this book, I created animations that had perfect lip syncs and strongly conveyed emotions. Another Fleming classic for my library.

If you are serious about animating, then you need this book. Previous reviews have said that there are too many pictures and not enough tutorials. This is true, however, pictures are what you need for a book on this subject! It illustrates over 40 facial expressions for realistic and cartoon humans, 40 more for cartoonish expressions (like getting wacked in the face with a pan), and illustrates each of the 16 visual phenomes (tongue and jaw included!) for real and cartoon humans. Furthermore, each of the expressions is described by moving 25 weighted morph targets through 4 essential regions. Because it describes, in detail, how much weight should be given to each morph target to yield a given expression, tutorials, in the traditional "step 1, step 2..." method, are not needed! All you need to do is get down the weighted morph targets, and it gives a thorough explaination as to how to get that done.With all of these amazing illustrations, the price of the book is worth it, but the commentary he offers (you could probably read all the words of the whole 380 page book in 2-3 hours, even much less) gives valuable advice as to how to further make your animations more realistic. This book offers a complete library of many facial expressions, AND, most importantly, how to get them!

This book is a priceless reference if you are into animating heads. There is complete details on all the facial muscles and how they move with example animations too. Plus an essential guide to head proportions. Before I bought this book my heads were always unrealistic and alien like, now they are a lot more accurate. In my opinion this book is an essential purchase for all animators.

I recently picked up "3D Creature Workshop" and "Animating Facial Features and Expressions". Now, typically, even the most entertaining novel can't hold my attention for more than an hour at a time before I leave it to hug the bookmark for a while. Putting these books down was the last thing on my mind. I read them both (cover to cover) yesterday afternoon. There's something to be said about that, and I think it goes along the lines of "you can give a man a fish and feed him for a day, or teach a man to fish and feed him for a lifetime." The theory in these books is something I so rarely find in artistic reference material. It forms enough of a foundation to develop individual style while learning from the tutorials, rather than the tutorials dictating the style.Not only did I enjoy the read, I actually feel as though I bought and paid for a higher education. I would suggest to anyone who is serious about creating plausable characters and animation, that these books are solid stepping stones. Thank you for letting us stand on your shoulders.