Am a 3D artist planning to shift to tech-art as soon as I get my portfolio of the ground… I am learning everything by myself as I go I don’t understand rigging and animation deformations and how they will work later so I need some advice…
I am currently working to create a cinematic in UDK… The scene has some facial animation… As someone who is attempting this for the first time I would like to know how the sculpt should be made so as to get the best range of emotions.
I wouldn’t want him to be stuck with neutral face no matter what he does…
He will be laughing getting angry shifting into madness and normal again…
The character with be according to next-gen specs thats 15k to 21k polygons(quads or tris? :/)…
I am sculpting him now… Should I give him a stern face or a neutral face?
Should I make wrinkle maps? How do I do that? Can you have that for the full range that I speak of? Is it that only mocap can do that?
Hey deohboeh,
Welcome to tech-artists.org and the wonderful world of tech-art. 
Facial animation can be done in a manner of ways, but one of the most common setups these days is to have the face driven by joints for most movement, with blendshapes for more extreme or sculpted emotions or a combination of blendshapes to hold volume in places like the cheeks, etc… If you’re looking at that, would be good to watch Judd Simantov’s TLOU rigging video to see a visual demonstration of this system. That can be viewed here:
Blendshapes can be quiet intensive on an engine, although those barriers are getting broken down more and more for next-gen (current-gen?). So the most efficient way is to have a solid base of joints which move the face via skinning, and blendshapes only added on when and as required. However, all these variables are down to the level of detail you need, the limitations/constraints of the game you’re working on and engine limitations. I’m not sure how UDK handles blendshapes, so that’s something to look into too.
Your best bet is to sculpt a neutral face shape, eyelids relaxed, mouth partially open, etc… This is just because making changes from neutral shapes is generally easier, especially hitting extremes on both sides. However, this isn’t always the case as you may need to make special cases or modify stuff for particular reasons. However, it’s a great place to start. You’ll also want to really nail the topology. There is a lot on polycount’s wiki on facial topology, which is a great place to start. Good facial topology can make or break a face, so definitely make sure you put the effort in here.
http://wiki.polycount.com/FaceTopology
15k-21k would be tris. This is because real-time models are almost always triangulated in-engine. What you do, making wrinkle maps and such, is really up to you. If you think you’re character or game sequence can support that or you think you need that to get the desired shapes, then feel free to do it. There will be a lot of information online regarding this, just search for “blending facial maps” or something similar. You can definitely have that in your range of emotion, mocap is just a way of capturing human movement and is usually transferred on to rig anyway as only facial scans or systems like LA Noire’s capturing technology really get that level of detail.
Hope this helps to answer your initial questions. Feel free to ask more or for clarification if you need.
Hey!!
Thanks for the help! The links and advice helped clarify a lot!
In your opinion is mocap possible from home? If so is it worth it for a small production?
There are ways to do mocap from a smaller setup, yea. But it’s either expensive (markless software like http://www.faceshift.com/ ) or by someone who knows their stuff and has the time to build their own studio: http://visserot.com/gollumpage.html . (That’s a pretty extreme example). It is possible do to it from home and it’s up to you whether its worth researching and implementing (for a research project) or whether you just want the work done.
Because of the relative shortness of your sequence described, I’d definitely hand animate it if I were you. Collect some good reference (target images and some video footage of you carrying out the motions yourself) and animate to that. Mocap is really useful for large scale productions with lots of animation that would be too time consuming and expensive to keyframe. It’s getting easier and easier to do for smaller setups, but for now I’d recommend doing some traditional keyframe animation, unless you are doing a research project where building a mocap studio or working with facial mocap data is something you’d like to do and have capacity to investigate.
Hope that answers your question.
Sweet!! This was massively helpful! 
after searching with the query you gave me I found a couple of blend shapes papers
http://www.naughtydog.com/docs/Naughty-Dog-GDC08-Mudbox.pdf
http://www.zbrushcentral.com/showthread.php?71430-Blending-Displacement-For-Facial-Animation-In-3DS-MAX-SUCCESS!!!
This is a bit off topic but I am going to be giving the character a cloak. Does the cloak need to be at neutral position? It will be flying around… and he will be removing it… and it will drop to the floor(hopefully… :)) Any technique you know might be helpful? really confused 
Ha, cool. Thanks for sharing those links.
For a cloak, it depends on how you want to animate it. Considering it’s for a cinematic, this sounds like a situation where simulation would be the best bet. Maya (assuming you’re using it) has an built-in cloth solving system called nCloth, which will also have a lot of material available online. Please note that you may find papers for the old cloth solving system when looking. However, games cannot use nCloth, so this has to be baked on to the mesh, usually through joints (though vertices can be baked too).
You will want to place evenly spaced joints and weight them correctly to a lower poly surface than perhaps you will want to simulate on (this is hard to get right and you will lose detail, unfortunately, but should be a lot easier and smoother with 4+ vert influences), then attach them to the simulated cloth surface. There are quite a few ways to do this too, and I think it’s possible with point on poly constraints in Maya. It’s generally easier to have the cloth as a flat plane, and will solve best with evenly spaced quads.
Keep in mind that simulations needs a LOT of tweaking to look correct, and will also need time to settle before an animation (especially if you’re applying wind dynamics, or something like that).
I would link you to some tutorials but I can’t immediately think of any definitive ones. I do remember watching a video on YouTube on simulating a pirate flag that was a nice introduction to the basic elements.
Sorry if you’re using Max, I’ve not had much experience with simulation in Max so I can’t really advise there. However, the fundamentals are the same.
Thanks Sophie for all the tremendously useful help that you have given me!
I think I will be baking the simulation per vert.
This is a very short tut on baking verts to joints for udk and unity.
Not a problem - glad I could help! That video essentially explains what I wrote up there in 17 seconds. Should have just linked that, haha! 