The Concept and Workflow of Animation-Ready Facial Feature Set Design

In this section, you will learn the concepts of designing facial features for vector-based characters by using the Adobe Flash. This involves in sketching various facial feature elements, loading and compacting them as one sprite, and displaying one of them in certain frame to create face expressions.

The Concept: Facial Feature Set

• It is highly recommended to design the facial feature elements you produce in Adobe Flash to be identical or very similar to those in the mapping list of the default element set of the Sprite Editor in CrazyTalk Animator.
  
  

  Facial Feature Sets: Eye, Mouth and Lips
  One Eye Elements: 13 Download the Eye Mapping List Image.	Mouth Elements: 21 Download the Mouth Mapping List Image.	Lip Sync Elements: 9 Download the Lip Sync Mapping List Image.

• You must design facial feature elements for the left and right eyes, eyebrows and ears separately.
• In CrazyTalk Animator, the elements of the facial features are automatically retrieved and displayed according to the expressions you apply.
  Please note that the expressions may come from the templates in the Face and Perform library, or by using the Puppeteering Panel to create an expression. Some of these expressions may be designed to switch facial feature elements at different times.

  Expression 1 applied (Expression auto-switches)	Expression 2 applied (Expression auto-switches)

• You can also manually switch to any other facial feature elements in a different frame via Sprite Editor.

Workflow: Mapping Custom Facial Features

In this example, you start to produce only the mouth with elements set. You may apply the same steps to create the other facial features.

1. Design at leas 21 mouth elements in Adobe Flash. The 21 elements must be produced according to the list shown in the Mouth Mapping List.
   
2. Convert each elements to Movie Clip symbol.
3. Export all the symbols by right click on them and select Export as Movie (Same as the Exporting Head Parts from Flash section).
   
4. In CrazyTalk Animator, apply a character. Switch to the Character Composer mode.
5. Click the Sprite Editor and use the Replace button to load all the element SWF data (Same as the Importing Body Elements section).
   
   • If you load a SWF data to a wrong item in the list, use the Page Up and Page Down keys to shift the data to another item.
   • These two buttons only move the data without affecting the original order of the list.

     SWF data applied to an inappropriate icon.	Page Up key moves the SWF data forward.

   • If you have produced lip shapes for different phonemes by Adobe Flash which are not in the default mapping list, then you can load them into the Lip mapping category.
     Download the Lip Sync Mapping List
     
6. Transform the facial feature elements in Element-level one by one (Same as the Aligning the Hand Elements - Element-level or Sprite-level section).