Building Your Character

 

We strongly recommend to build out your character in stages. Technically, Live streams the below shapes in realtime, but it is common that creating all of these shapes does not always create the best animation. With simpler, stylized characters, creating a character for realtime animation requires the character to be created “to the technology,” often the modelers and riggers sit in front of their webcams to see how shapes interact. We recommend by starting with these “primary” shapes to get the general gross movement from the performance, then add on the “secondary” shapes as needed, but do so sporadically so that you can control and determine what each additional shape does. If possible, it is recommended to use blendshapes to control your rig. Joints or hybrid rigs will certainly work, but blendshapes are typically easier to perform character setup with in all of the available client applications, as well as being more efficient within the Live Client plugin itself due to fewer total controls.

 

Here is the shape list that we recommend starting with:

 

1. Mouth open
   
    
2. Phoneme - OO
   
    
3. Phoneme - mbp
   
    
4. Eyes - right
   
    
5. Eyes - left
   
    
6. Eyes - down
   
    
7. Eyes - up
   
    
8. Left eye - blink
   
    
9. Right eye - blink
   
    
10. Left brow - up
    
     
11. Left brow - down
    
     
12. Right brow - up
    
     
13. Right brow - down
    
     
14. Mid brows - up
    
     
15. Mid brows - down
    
     
16. Left eye - wide open
    
     
17. Right eye - wide open
    
     
18. Smile - left
     
     
19. Smile - right
    

Once you've built these core shapes and are happy with how they are working, you can work on perfecting the rest of the expressions, listed below, to get the most out of using Live.

1. Jaw - left
   
    
2. Jaw - right
   
    
3. Upper Lip Up - left
   
    
4. Upper Lip Up - right
   
    
5. Lower Lip Down - left
   
    
6. Lower Lip Down - right
   
7. Mouth Stretch - left
   
    
8. Mouth Stretch - right
   
    
9. Mouth Narrow - left
   
    
10. Mouth Narrow - right
    
     
11. Frown - left
    
    
     
12. Frown - right
    
     
13. Mouth Scrunch - left
    
     
14. Mouth Scrunch - right
    
     
15. Phoneme - CH
    
16. Mouth - up
    
     
17. Mouth - down
    
    
    If you are using head motion with Live, your rig should be able to do the following:

 

1. Head rotation - left
   
    
2. Head rotation - right
   
    
3. Head rotation - up
   
    
4. Head rotation - down
   
    
5. Head tilt - left
   
    
6. Head tilt - right