Mudbox Portrait

We have now been given the project to digitally sculpt a fellow student in our class by using reference photos taken by ourselves and by using these sculpt their face by using Mudbox. I have chosen to sculpt Josh Jackaman.

I have never used Mubox before so I am looking forward to trying something new other than Maya and to be honest I am not a fan of Maya as I find it a bit in your face. Mudbox has a far easier to look at display with very simple tools to use, you can add materials or remove them, you can smooth your work out or even cut it away to create jagged edges. It is like using a piece of clay but without the mess. I also found it very easy to use and got the hang of the use of the different tools however this was when I was just making up a random face, once I took the pictures for josh and began referencing the face I found it very irritating and frustrating just how different angles make someone look symmetrical but when you look closely and move the attributes into the right place according to your reference image you discover how wrong it looks.

But overall once you get past this bump it is a very user friendly program as it can show you roughly where the basic topology is when you put the wireframe on which is very helpful. I am though very proud of my final model as it does look like who it is supposed to be and I feel Josh is glad he doesn’t look like a monster.

Face Topology

Facial Action Coding System

Facial Action Coding System (FACS) is a system to taxonomize human facial expressions, originally developed by Paul Ekman and Wallace V. Friesen in 1978. It is a common standard to systematically categorize the physical expression of emotions, and it has proven useful to psychologists and to animators.

Uses

Using FACS, human coders can manually code nearly any anatomically possible facial expression, deconstructing it into the specific Action Units (AU) and their temporal segments that produced the expression. As AUs are independent of any interpretation, they can be used for any higher order decision making process including recognition of basic emotions, or pre-programmed commands for an ambient intelligent environment. The FACS Manual is over 500 pages in length and provides the AUs, as well as Dr. Ekman’s interpretation of their meaning.
FACS defines AUs, which are a contraction or relaxation of one or more muscles. It also defines a number of Action Descriptors, which differ from AUs in that the authors of FACS have not specified the muscular basis for the action and have not distinguished specific behaviors as precisely as they have for the AUs.
For example, FACS can be used to distinguish two types of smiles as follows:

• Insincere and voluntary Pan American smile: contraction of zygomatic major alone
• Sincere and involuntary Duchenne smile: contraction of zygomatic major and inferior part of orbicularis oculi.

Although the labeling of expressions currently requires trained experts, researchers have had some success in using computers to automatically identify FACS codes, and thus quickly identify emotions. Computer graphical face models, such as CANDIDE or Artnatomy, allow expressions to be artificially posed by setting the desired action units.
The use of FACS has been proposed for use in the analysis of depression, and the measurement of pain in patients unable to express themselves verbally.
FACS is designed to be self-instructional. People can learn the technique from a number of sources, including manuals and workshops, and obtain certification through testing. A variant of FACS has been developed to analyze facial expressions in chimpanzees.
P. Ekman and W. V. Friesen also developed EMFACS (Emotion Facial Action Coding System) and FACSAID (Facial Action Coding System Affect Interpretation Dictionary) which consider only emotion-related facial actions. For example:

Happiness = 6+12

Sadness = 1+4+15

Surprise = 1+2+5B+26

Fear = 1+2+4+5

Anger = 4+ 5+7+23

Disgust = 9+16+15

Contempt = R12A+R14A

Codes for Action Units

For clarification, FACS is an index of facial expressions, but does not actually provide any bio-mechanical information about the degree of muscle activation. Though muscle activation is not part of FACS, the main muscles involved in the facial expression have been added here for the benefit of the reader.

Action Units (AUs) are the fundamental actions of individual muscles or groups of muscles.

Action Descriptors (ADs) are unitary movements that may involve the actions of several muscle groups (e.g., a forward‐thrusting movement of the jaw). The muscular basis for these actions hasn’t been specified and specific behaviors haven’t been distinguished as precisely as for the AUs.

For most accurate annotation, FACS suggests agreement from at least two independent certified FACS encoders.

Intensity Scoring

Intensities of FACS are annotated by appending letters A–E (for minimal-maximial intensity) to the Action Unit number (e.g. AU 1A is the weakest trace of AU 1 and AU 1E is the maximum intensity possible for the individual person).

• A Trace
• B Slight
• C Marked or Pronounced
• D Severe or Extreme
• E Maximum

The Making of Metal Gear Solid 4

When Hideo Kojima the Producer/Director of MGS4 was young he wrote a action-adventure novel with a hard boiled action hero who drove a car and was in hard core action chases. However he had never driven a car before therefore he couldn't write the novel with a sense of realisim and as Metal Gear is all about military combat and none of the development team had ever held a gun or experienced military combat this would make designing and developing the game difficult as it is easy to watch something but unless you experience how something works such as driving a car or firing a gun you can never bring a sense of realisim.

Aswell as MGS being a fictional all the military equipment and vehicles are all real production models or in production and along with that the stroy is based on life time events from something in the world news, throughout the MGS series all of them have a moral to the story and a point not just some made up stealth shooter game.

To help understand the enviroments of the game Hideo Kojima got the development team to travel around to different locations around the world to help look at the architecture of the buildings and understand the wilderness as MGS4 is not in just one environment but has locations everywhere around the world from built up urban areas, to snow and blizzard like locations. The benefit of visitng these locations help the devlopers visualize the environments in the game.

The desigining of the characters starts with a brainstorm then it is edited and created into a 3D animation with a voice actor to bring the character to life and many of the people couldn't imagine the main character Snake as an old man.They also changed the style of gameplay as it is the last of the MGS series. As for the 4 beautys in the game they were all modelled and had motion capture pictures taken of them from many different angles to help build a real model of there faces. Kojima wanted the player to discover the inner beauty of the beasts when you defeat them.

For the sound the effects they all had to blend the voice acting, sound and effects into the background and are individually made for the game experience. This game had a the idea about going for surrond sound for the cinema experince as the game has the movie like cinematics. The music is used to help create an event in the game and help tell the story of a difficult situation or theme. The music was taken to Skywalker ranch and the this was a dream for the production team. The scripts are now designed as movies with long and eventful dialog. Along with the voice acting you have the motion capture actors for the animators to take it and edit it for the story.

To begin with the team started there game making at Kobe however the great Hanshin Earthquake destroyed everything in Kobe, this then meant that the team had to move to Ebisu in Tokyo to finish MGS2.

Metal Gear became a world wide phenomina at E3 in Atlanta and it now hasn't been the same since. While the team stays in Tokyo Kojima and some of the producers travel the world and speak about the games that will be coming up in the distant future. This is because it is open to the whole public allowing them to see the response of the consumers.