Part 1
1. Toon Boom Animate ProFeatures and Functions:
· This is the firstfree animation software for Macunder this list. The toon boom animate pro is a Canadian software company that specializes in the production and storyboarding software.
· The software can be used for the storyboarding for television, web, films, mobile phones, animation, games etc.
Headshot, the AI-powered Character Creator plugin generates 3D realtime digital humans from one photo. Apart from intelligent texture blending and head mesh creation, the generated digital doubles are fully rigged for voice lipsync, facial expression, and full body animation. Headshot contains two AI modes: Pro Mode & Auto Mode. Windows Mac OS X 3D Maps From Photos PixPlant includes advanced tools to extract 3D maps from plain photos or from the seamless tiling textures that you can generate from them. Extract Normal, Displacement, Diffuse, Specular and Ambient Occlusion maps - all these 3D maps can then be fine-tuned with the included editing tools. FaceMaker is a 3D application based on WebGL. We recommend a graphics card with good 3D acceleration performance as well as good CPU speed (min. 2 GHz, 4 GB RAM). Please maximize your browser or use full screen and quit all other running 3D applications. The user interface is optimized for FullHD (1920 x 1080). VTuber Maker is the #1 free, simplistic, and 3D Tool for VTuber Content Production, just with a webcam. The VTuber Maker Tool, powered by Live3D, has let more and more people create, share and have fun! The core features of our product: 1) High-performance, high-sensitivity facial capture technology., even In bright or dim environments. Welcome to '3D Face'! A free, fast and full functional App to make your face look 3d. Transform your photos by choosing a photo and go to 3d scan and warp it to third dimension. Save your 3d photo to your photo album or send them to your friends. This app is for all iOS Devices with iOS 4.0.2.
Chrome download 64 bit full. · The software can be used by a variety of people whether they are professionals working in the animation field or whether they are aspiring students who eventually want to placed somewhere in the animation world.
Pros of toon boom animate pro.
· The software has a centralized databa_x_se system and is extensively used in the film and animation industry. The databa_x_se is quite efficient and it also allows the animators to use the software with least difficulty.
· Thisfree animation software for Maccan be used easily by the beginners.
· It has almost all the opus features and can be easily used for cutout animation style. The software has tools that can be used to draw textures with pencil; it has the morphing tools, deformation tool, particles, built-in compositor, 2D or 3D integration.
Cons of toon boom animate pro.
· There are no online tutorials for some of the versions.
· It loads very slowly even on higher RAM
· Non-NVidia chipsets are not supported by thisfree animation software for Mac.
User Reviews:
· PLE edition very limited. -http://animation.about.com/od/softwarereviews/gr/tbanimatereview.htm
Access old mac hard drive. ·Toon Boom is next on my shopping list of mindbogglingly expensive software tools for starving artists. -http://www.awn.com/forum/thread/1014088
·Used to use 'Animo' back in the day, and ToonBoom reminds me a lot of that, since it has tools for detecting line weight in scanned art, formulating colour regions etc. It seems to be built specifically for 2d character animation - either scanned or drawn directly. -http://www.awn.com/forum/thread/1014088
Screenshot:
Face Generator (unreleased, 1980s)
Backin the Last Days of the Atari ST, one of the first things I prototypedwith my shiny new 386PC was a face generator program.
Theidea was that you'd input exact measurements of certain proportions ofthe human face, and the program would them 'cartoon' them as lineart.Once you had a small library of face metrics, you'd be able to get theprogram to generate additional faces as tweened versions, randomisedversions of particular populations, or exaggerated versions of thedifference between given faces.
Since the program was onlygenerating lineart (and a little bit of eyeball shading), itwas easy to produce real-time changes,and the program quickly got a few manually-programmed expressionalgorithms. If you wanted the character to look right, or up, ordown, it wouldn't just bethe eyeball alignment that that would change, parts of themesh overlay for the eyelids would be 'pulled' in sympathy.
Theidea was that the program would have alternative versionsof the same face showing different expressions, and wouldisolateand save thedifferences as 'expression' files, andthen it'd accumulate a library of expressions that could be applied byvarying amounts, to any of theotherfaces. I was also working on finding the absolute minimal set ofadditional features that would be useful for 3D. The idea was thatif youwere, say, a comicbook artist drawing the same character overandover again, then the program would giveyou they key features of that face, from any given angle,showing any given expression or combination of expressions. The artistcould then put in the surrounding profile details themselves.It'dbasically be doing for the facewhat those wooden artist's mannequins do for body poses. It'dalsohelp people who couldn't really draw to producehalf-decent comics. :)
Theprototype worked satisfyingly well, but I ended up abandoning itbecauseit didn't have an obvious market other than peoplewho needed help keeping comicbook characters fresh but consistent, oras the basis ofa 'talking head' for PC-based news delivery.Long-term I wasplaying with the idea that I could perhaps also produce a speechsynthesislibrary, and have a PC download the daily news as a streamingtextfeedwith embedded gestural information, with the character of yourchoice as a virtual newsreader in the corner of your screen. With moreadvanced hardware than was generally available in the 1980'sone might beable to package a mapped high-resolution face image along with itsfacial metrics, and have the program morph the photographed facereal-time to match the spoken text. Choose your own Newsreader! But itwas all a bitnebulous,and the project was sucking up a lot of R&D time without anobviousfinancial payoff. So I pulled the plug.
SingularInversions' FaceGen
Anyhow, doing a bit of googling on the subject in2008 for old times sake, it seems that there arenow a few different companies that've written customface-generating programs, which now outputfully-rendered 3Dimagesand/or 3D data formodeling packages. Best private browser. There's now a market for developing computer gamingcharacters or online avatars that didn't exist when I was tinkeringwith the idea.
3d Face Generator Machine
The program that I just had a little play with wasonecalled FaceGen, which has a free export-disabledevaluationversion.
Forserious work, you're supposed to feed in front and side views of aface, mark a few key points, and it'll generate a corresponding 3Dshape. However, FaceGen is smart enough to make a pretty good guessusing just a single front-facing (or roughly front-facing)image.Subsequent manipulations of the eye-mesh assume that the subject waslooking directly forwards when the photo was taken.
Here'swhat it managed to do with a few single images of distinctive celebrityfaces. Some of the profile views aren't so convincing, butthat'sgoing to be at least partly because I didn't give theprogram 'profile' photos to work from (as you'resupposedto).
| AlbertEinstein |
| FaceGen did a decent job froma badly-colorised sourcepicture. The tip of the nose should have been a littlemore bulbous,and the shape of the head looks wrong (to me), but a finishedimagewould normally havehair, so no biggie. |
| AngelinaJolie | BritneySpears |
| Anywebpage on computer graphics and faces HAS to include at least oneattempt at Angelina Jolie. It's The Law. | I tried twodifferent Britneypics and both default FG models were a bit grim, for differentreasons. But a 50:50 average of the two 'Mutant Britney' files, usingthe FG 'tween' function, workedsurprisingly well, and managed to distill out the commonfeatures of both photos. |
| DanniMinogue | JenniferLove Hewitt |
| Afew manualparameter tweekshelped this one no end. For this test, I switched the textureoff, saw how close I could get to a recognisable stylisedrepresentation, and then switched the texture back on again. | Ifyou weredoing thisproperly, you'd want to erase theoverlapping hair in the source image first. Other than that,it came out pretty well. |
| ZhangZiyi | JanetJackson |
| FGdoesn'task you to identifythe eyebrow line, it worksit out for itself. In this case, FaceGengot thrown by the veryheavy eyemakeup, anddecided that thetop of Janet's eyelids were actually her eyebrows. The composite imagelooks adequate, but if you switch the texture map off .. ew!It's gone horribly wrong .. | |
| ShaznayLewis | KimberleyDavies |
| FaceGenlikesShaznay! To see if it was a fluke, I tried a second picture, and it liked that, too.[[.fg file].Good lighting helps. | |
| LyndaCarter | JeriRyan ('Seven of Nine') |
| Theresult of using a rough, bittyimage, with teethshowing. Unless there's some trick that I've missd, FG doesn't seem tolike teeth in an image, and doesn't have an obvious way of letting youset alip line 'edge' (see earlier comments about not being able to manuallydefine eyelid cutouts). | Ithought that the 'Borgeyepiece' might confuse FG, but it cleverly ignored it. |
Here are a few 'beforeand after' pictures of what FaceGen does. On the left is a smallthumbnail of the original source image, then we have a view of theoutputFaceGen face, a smoothed view of just the surface, the surface plus thesource mesh grid, and the mesh grid with the 'texture' overlay derivedfrom the photograph. The file for these images is here. As before,click on the 'bordered' images to see larger versions.
| CharismaCarpenter | ||||
| sourceimage | FaceGenoutput | smoothedsurface | meshwithout texture | textureand mesh |
FaceGen then lets you morph, tween,tweek, and shift a face by age, orethnicity, or a variety of other averaged trends, and can alsoapply some facial expressions.
Theprogram seems to be hampered by the lack of a decent expressionlibrary, but I guess that if you're producing faces that'll be renderedas a tiny piece of screen in a shoot-em-up, perhaps there's not so muchjustification in developing a proper set of convincing expressions,beyond cartoon shock and 'Grrrrr!'. It also has 'phoneme-specific'expressions, presumably for people who need to animate talkingfaces.
FaceGen is a commercial program, butthe free demo version is okay for'play' aslong as you don't mind losing its ability to export .objobject files. It'll still export '[.fg'files in its own format, which consists of the face parameter set,manual parameters, and the texture map. Some games can apparentlyimport fg files, so if you're a game enthusiast and want tocreate your own face for your online avatar, or you think that it'd befunny to have the cast of Casablanca shooting aliens or the panel of XFactor running amok in Grand Theft Auto, then FaceGen might be areasonably fast way to get results. If you want to exportyour [.fg files to more generic computer-modelling mesh files so thatyou canuse them in 'pro' 3D graphics apps, then you'll probably need to getthe full commercial version.
Looxis Faceworx
Another freebie is FaceWorx fromLooxis. This one doesexport object files, but it's only free for non-commercial use.
Looxishave more of an emphasis on 3D portraiture, and they have booths thatlet you sit down, be photographed, and have your head computer-modelledandlaser-etched into a glass block. Consequently their program isdesigned more as a front-end for generating accurate 3D facesurface data, formore conventionalcomputer-modelling applications.
FaceGen vs Faceworx
The two companies are coming at the problem fromdifferentangles. Looxisare focused on generating standard, accurate 3D files for export tootherprograms, and the Looxis program lets you spend a lot of timefine-tuning the details of a face by moving guide marks. If you wantto, you can use a lot of guide marks to produce avery faithful 3Dmesh-map of the given face. It'll tween and smooth the data, andproject the original photograph over the surface as a texture map, butif you really want a truly convincing rendering of a face's contours,it's really up toyou to spend some time clicking very accurately.
The emphasis of the SI programme is more on automatic analysis andrecognition of facial structure. FaceGenalready knows alot about faces. Althoughit renders 3D maps and textures in the same way as Faceworx, FaceGen storesfaces as combinations of physiological parameters (nostril tilt, noselength, etc.). FaceGen's 'photofit' function only needs a verysmall number of points - sides of the nose and mouth, centreofthe eyes, etc -- and it then tries to recreate aface byanalysing the photo(s) provided and tilting, sizing, and randomisingits model until it finds a combination of metrics that it thinks mightproduce the best matchto those photographs, when appropriately angled and lit. Itthengeneratesa mesh that is texture-mapped in a similar way to Faceworx. Thecomputer's doing all the serious work, but all thatanalysis means that if your computer is slow and doesn't have agraphicsaccelerator, it might take fifteen minutes for it to analyse a face.Once FaceGen has finished, you'll get arealistic-looking face model,but it might veer slightly away from the original in terms of anyunusualaspects that are difficult to replicate using that stack of parameters. The texture map created from the original photo willusually do a decent job of putting these missed detailsback, buttheremight be a few unusual shaping subtleties that the softwarecan'tquite mimic by varying its standard parameter set. The use ofafixed parameter set means that extreme 'caricature' variations canstill look reasonablynatural, but it won't always give enough variables to perfectly emulatethe precise line of a distinctive nose, or an eyelid crease.FaceGen also looksas if it's trying to 'rotate' eyes by distorting a meshrather than by implementing proper swivellable eyeballs as spheresbehind theface.
3d Face Online
Summary:
- Faceworx allows you touse front and side images to manually place accurate points, andso it tends ot produce crisper detail andhopefully a more recognisable, more accurate final 3D contourmap ofthesubject .. but since it's relying on you to placeall thosecontrol points, it takes a certain amount of skill, and any lack ofaccuracy on the user's part can result ina face that has subtle wonkiness or jagginess, fracturingtheillusion. And once you've generated your static 3D model, there's not alot you can do with it other than light it and look at it from otherangles, or export it into another program for more powerful processing.
- FaceGen does almostall the work for you, and can make abrave attempt at a 3D map from even asingle image .. but some aspects of the resulting faceprofile might be a little 'generic'. It's good atmatching alot of aspects of bone structure, and will tend to get therightsort of jawline and head shape, but if you zoom on on aneyelid, you'll find that there don't seem to beenough 'eyeshape' parameters for it to always be able to recreate a'distinctive'eye properly within the 3D model, without the help of theoverlaid'photographic' layer .. if you're modelling a 'known' face, you'lltendto find that the contours of the eye region in the output file areslightlystandard-looking, andthat the distinctive detail is instead being superimposed by theprojectedtexture map. If you take a recognisable face, and switch that texturemap off,so that you're just looking at a pure setofcomputer-generated contours, the 'known' face isn'talways recognisable. And because it's relying on the projectedtexture map, some features can look a bit fuzzy and imprecise. Itmanages some subtle features surprisingwell, but other aspects like lip line, eyelid detail or thefleshy tip of a nose are more difficult to parameterise.
| BarackObama | A few sample FaceGen'.fg' files (for more, see the facebankpage): Anna Friel| Claudia Black | Freema Agyeman| MorenaBaccarin | KaleyCuoco | MonicaBellucci | MelanieSykes | ShaznayLewis |
Face Generator Free
- Idon't have any relationship with any of these other companies or theirprogrammers. I just thought that the programs were cool.
- Iused celebrity faces in these 'tutorial' examples because a lot ofpeople will be familiar with them, and unless you're familiar with aface, it's difficult to judge how well a program works. Educationaluse. This doesn't mean that it's okay to use other people's faces incommercial products or advertising or promotions. It isn't. If youstart using one of these files to produce materials in a way that wouldnormally require the subject's permission for the use of an image, andyou don't have that permission, you're still liable to getsued by them.
- FaceGenand Faceworx are both primarily aimed at applications in which theoperatorhas full control over the posing and lighting of the originalphotograph (front and side view, eyes front, even lighting, blankexpression). Some of the other photographs that I tried, with sidelighting orstrongly tilted faces, didn't work as well as the images above. Ifyou're thinking of buying FG, try the free version first,with some material that's representative of what you'll beworkingwith.
- FaceGen– @ Singular Inversions – 'smart' face creator/manipulator,highly automated. Free version lacks .OBJ export
- Faceworx– @Looxis.com – 'manual' face-transcription software.
- Poser– afull-figure modelling and animation program. Poser is probably the thebest-known 'computer mannequin' program
- DAZ3D– a free program that reads Poser files. DAZ make their money fromsellingadd-in computer models for people to use within the program.
- Blender– a free generic 3D modelling program (but with a notoriouslylonglearning curve due to the 'quirky' user-interface).
- Wikipedia:Anatomical simulation – a useful category that I created onWikipedia
- ErkDemon Blog– for feedback or discussion of these pages
Free 3d Generator
