So let's have a close up look at the
expression tests I created for the character rain.
This will be less of a tutorial and more of a walk through or
guide on how to achieve these expressions in a believable and appealing way.
We already went over the smile but I also created a mild
version before that with less mouth movement and upwards movement on the brows
instead of
them kind of contracting inwards.
This upwards movement is coming from the front tallis
muscle that is covering most of the forehead.
This way we have just the lower eyelid pushing up
overall. The smile looks much more relaxed and can be held for much longer
for the open smile. It's mostly the same as the one we did in the previous video.
The obvious difference is that the lips won't touch
here.
Again, it becomes very important that the upper lip is pretty much a straight line.
This is due to the liver to muscle which is pulling on the lips as well.
The teeth can rest against the lower lip so that there isn't much
of an opening or they can at least be close to the teeth.
The open mouth also comes a bit from the jaw rotation,
so make sure to use the shape key you create before to open the mouth slightly
blending the shape keys together to create new expressions
is going to be very helpful.
Another thing to keep in mind
when closing the eyes a bit
is that the apex of the eyelid stays the same.
The apex is essentially
the turning point of the arc on any of the two eyelets.
It's definitely important to keep the lower eyelid from becoming a convex line
at most.
The lower eyelid is becoming straight with two
additional small corners to push it further upwards.
The laugh expression
is definitely more tricky because it's a very aggressive version of an open smile.
This sort of expression definitely works better as an
animation and so instead of a still image,
since the expression is inherently kind of painful,
this is the sort of expression
that will make your face hurt if you keep it up too long.
The muscle movement of the Z. Gramatica's
really gets pushed to the limit so the mouth corners moved pretty far.
The lips role in even more because of the tension and upwards movement
and the distance from the upper lip to the nose becomes even smaller.
The muscles around the eyes, like the orbit calories occupy
also pushed further and the eyes become way more close than before,
really contracted
with all that flesh from the cheeks
moved upwards.
The lower eyelids are moving up quite a bit
but are still at most flat with two corners that point downwards
the combined downwards movement of the brows and upwards
movement of the cheeks and the nose sneer.
Cause one crease or more to form on the nose bridge with added volume.
The same happens in the space between the eyes and ears.
Make sure to bulge them a little bit with the inflate brush
to get that increase in volume in there,
there's also the the pressure super silly or super kili and cora gator.
Or in short we're just going to reference it as the core,
A gator that moves the center of the browse more downwards and inwards.
This muscle is generally responsible for the downward movement of the brows.
It's also important that it will always move on
both sides of the face at the same time.
So it's naturally very hard to raise one eyebrow while pushing the center down
so a tip is to always see both eyebrows as a single connected line.
There should be no visible break between them where
one eyebrow is really moving up at the center
and the other one is really moving down because
it will look like the muscles got ripped apart.
Just try it yourself in front of a mirror to
raise one eyebrow while pushing down the other one,
no matter how crazy you move them, you can't really disconnect them.
The brows moving inwards and downwards creates a crease
that forms around the corner of the eyebrows.
The job,
the jaw rotates probably even further which shows more of the N. M. Mouth.
Just make sure that the brows and jaw stay relatively consistent in
their shape with only a little bit of removed or added volume.
Especially on the browse,
it can be very easy to accidentally create a Neanderthal version of your character
or accidentally push in the bone structure
which makes the face looks super elastic.
If we look at the reference photos again we can see the
difference between a regular open smile and a full on laugh.
The muscles get generally pushed further and the creases deepen.
What can also happen is that the upper lip gets pushed
even higher to reveal more gums instead of just the teeth
for the angry expression.
It's not too different since some similar muscles are used.
So let's dissect the individual aspects of the angry look in the reference.
The most important thing is of course the eyebrows,
the core a gator again moves the middle section of the
eyebrows down and in words which creates the slight V.
Shape to the eyebrows.
Don't overdo the V.
Shape though,
since you might end up with very Jack Nicholson looking
eyebrows where the outer parts are being pushed upwards,
move the entire eyebrows down with an emphasis on the section between both of them.
With that downwards movement.
There is a bunching up of flash between the eyes which
gets even stronger due to the sneer by the L.
L. S. E. N.
This near is also pulling up the nose wings and the lips again
which is very visible this time.
The cheeks also get pushed up a little bit
which is pronouncing the crease below the lower eyelids.
Overall there's a lot of compression happening around the ice which
is also increasing the amount of volume in the area,
the sneer and chin upwards movement by the L. L. S. E. N.
And mentalists are really pushing up the lips
when this is also pulling on the skin around the jaw and cheek.
And with a strong pulling by the mentalist on
the chin we get these noticeable dots forming.
This is because the muscle is directly connected to the skin around the chin
and is pulling on it to push up the area
when looking at the mouth from the side view.
It's also noticeable how the lower lip gets pushed forward
slightly overlapping the upper lip.
Since the upper lips get pushed up so much it creates an
increase in volume so the upper lip bulges outwards a bit more.
Looking at rains angry expression. We can see a lot of the same movement.
Notable differences are that I pushed up the lower eyelids
to make them straight lines. Again.
I also pulled on the so called res or ius muscle
to exaggerate the frowning more
so the lips are being pushed up
in the center by the mentalist and the corners are
pulled to the side and downwards by the resort areas.
Looking at rains lips. From the site, we can see
that clear forwards push
by the lower lip.
I also rolled the lips inwards a little bit
more to exaggerate the motion and make the lips thinner
to exaggerate this even more.
You could rotate the jaw a little bit in words to make her
bite down even harder and compress the entire lower area of the face.
Just don't overdo it though,
since you don't want to make it look like the teeth are breaking or
they're too elastic,
its bones clashing on bones after all.
Another interesting tip is to communicate the angry eyebrows well,
make the middle section of the eyebrows overlap the eyes themselves slightly,
so you can see here that the islets are closing in
to make the eyes narrower,
but the eyebrows are moving down so much that they overlap the ice too.
Moving on to the angry shout from here,
it's basically a similar evolution as with a smile to the laughing expression.
A lot of the muscles, especially around the eyes get pushed to their limit.
Notable differences are the open mouth by the job rotation,
but also the increased poor on the resort areas.
To get even more of that frown in the mouth
on the reference. We can see
the effect that the muscle can have on the neck as well.
It's essentially pulling not on the mouth corner,
but
from slightly more in the middle, which causes the wide arc on the lower lip.
This muscle goes all the way to the neck,
which causes these pulled out lines and extra creases that moves towards the neck.
You can also vary how much teeth you want to show the more teeth the more aggressive
for rain. I decided to show a lot of upper teeth but not so far as to show the gums
the lower teeth I hit almost completely behind the
lower lip which is pushing against them a lot.
If there's one thing I'd like to change afterwards
is that I was pulling much more on the mouth
corner than the lower lip with the resort areas which
is causing the strength this strange corner to happen.
Remember to also pull on the ears whenever you get
that muscle that strong muscle movement from the zygomatic us
for example,
there are some muscles that weren't mentioned or used much so far.
This is why testing the full range of expressions or at least most of them
is so important
with the worried expression.
We get to use the frontal is much more, which is the big muscle along the forehead.
This muscle is essentially to muscles on each side of the face
that can be pulled independently.
This gives us more freedom to move our eyebrows in a variety of ways.
So you are always able to either move the middle
section on both sides upwards or the outer section on
either site independently
or all together for this expression. We just need the middle part of the muscle.
We can couple this with the inwards
and downwards movement by the corrugated which hinders
the upwards movement a bit but causes some creases to form in the middle.
The front Alice can't do this by itself since
it is pulling slightly sideways in the opposite direction,
you can really feel that tension in your forehead
when using both these muscles at the same time
in the reference,
there's also more going on at the forehead.
There's actually a muscle that wraps all around the scope
is being used to push the hair forward and backward
to open the mouth.
We can simply rotate the jaw a bit but it also helps to pull a tiny bit
on the resort areas to get some more frowning from the mouth from the mouth corner.
You can also add a little bit of a sneer with the L. L. S. E. N.
Depending on how much you want to exaggerate the expression
on rains expression.
I did move the upper lip upwards a bit which is in hindsight incorrect
but I do recommend to keep the lower lip
relatively straight and have the upper lip as an arc
in this expression. It also
becomes pretty obvious why I split the eyebrows into three sections.
Each section is generally connected to specific muscle movements and
it's generally pretty appealing to have that division visible.
We can start creating variations from the worried expression.
The first branch of expressions that we can do
is a sad and maybe even a crying expression
for the sad expression.
You essentially keep the motion around the eyes but you increase the sneer and
up movement on the cheeks.
Remember to keep the lower eyelid as a straight line with two additional
corners on the sides if you need to push it up even more,
pushing these areas around the eyes also increases the well creases
and has always been pushing up the cheeks,
make sure that the volume stay consistent while they shift around
one big difference from the previous expression
is the mouth movement.
Also, I definitely over exaggerated the expression of it.
It doesn't really seem genuine here,
but the mentalist is once again pushing up the lips and if you want to purse
the lips a little bit, you can add that to.
This is basically caused by
a muscle called the Arabic uterus oris,
which is going around the lips and pulls and kind of contracts them together
in the same way the Arabic uterus occupied us around the ice.
This muscle is mainly used when doing, for example, a kiss mouth
and remember that these two muscles are essentially
like pulling the cords on a hoodie.
That's at least a nice way of remembering it
on rains expression.
You can see the same person of the lips by
the secularist Horace and upwards pushing by the mentalist.
This usually also causes the lips to roll a bit inwards.
I can also recommend to pull on the resort is again,
to get that exaggerated frown in there as well
for a crying expression. It's basically the same step
as with going from the open smile
to laughing,
you push the same muscles to the limit and
make the expression look more painful and more emotional,
adding extra objects for tears can also be a very nice indicator to add,
which I did do for the expression tests on the Spring Open movie.