Mixamo Claire - 2D Facial Animation in Blender
Added 2022-06-27 14:11:52 +0000 UTCHere's a little Early Access treat to start your week, it's the Claire animation I've made on Sunday's stream. UPDATE: I've re-rendered the sequence after baking the particles, they jumped around in the previous version.
Some of the Mixamo characters come with a variety of eye and mouth shapes as part of the 2D texture. I've discovered this by accident recently and wondered if and how this could be animated. I made it work in Daz Studio and wanted to try it out in Blender in last weekend's stream, and this is the result. I gave Claire here some extra life with eye blinks, making her look around and make her mouth move. I've added some particles to bring some atmosphere to the scene and added a subdivision surface modifier to eliminate some of the low-poly look.
I've noticed a little too late that the mouth/brows/eyes were a little too far away from the figure, I suppose by default so they wouldn't intersect. After all Claire isn't meant to be used as close-up as I'm using her, and with the light these parts threw shadows and made this fact too obvious. I've brought these elements as close as I could. Next time I'll try to add brow movement too.
This was rendered at 50 iterations per frame in Blender 3.2. If you want to know how I did it, you can watch the stream here.
