Title: How to set up the system
Author: Gedalia Pasternak
Created: Nov 1, 2K
Last modified: December 12, 2K
To do: 

Installing the system

Copy BoneExp.dle into your max plug-ins directory. Depending on your install you may have to compile the exporter as well. The BoneExp exporter creates 2 exporters a Binary Mesh Exporter available via the export menu. As well as a Skeletal animation file format. The BoneExp project started as part of a discreet open source project called Dejaview a basic skeletal system exporter and playback system. You can find the original code on Discreet's website. 

Place the files in the Maxtools Directory in the appropriate maxscripts directory. Note: I usually place the macroscripts onto a customized toolbar and access them that way. 

How to set up the system

Approximate time to initially set up the model is under 3 hours. The majority of the work is weighting the jaw with the skin modifier.

Building the muscles

Assuming that you have the tool bar set up. Click the build muscles button. This should create the default facial armature.    Note: I've found the maxscripts plugins to be a bit buggy. If the script crashes you may have to plunk down a random object and add a muscle and a circular muscle modifier to it. This seems to initialize the modifier properly and you can the properly run the build muscles script.     Alternatively, you can just merge in an existing armature.      The result should be the following (without the mesh): One big thing to be aware of is that some of the muscles (forehead, limited) the parameterization on the eyelids expect that the face's plane of symmetry is the yz plane. That the right eye is at [-x,y,z] and the left eye is at [+x,y,z]

Editing the muscles

Standard muscles: linear, limited, cheek, forehead. The various parameters: Start   - the distance from the start of the muscle that the muscle stops pulling at. This is how the wrinkles are achieved and keeps verts from winding up at the bone anchor of the muscle. The inner blue arc. This value should actually be a percentage but that wasn't changed in release 1.0 End    -  the percent beyond the end of the muscle that the muscle still pulls at. This is visually represented  by the outer blue arc Angle - In the code called zone, is the angle of the cone of the muscle. Clamp - the strength of each contraction of the muscle, the lower the weaker the change. If you  Additional Limited params Limited muscle is only used around the mouth it does a path walk to make sure the upper lip doesn't get tagged along with the lower lip. Path Length -  Similar to the edge distance option in mesh select modified. xfactor - an additional constraint that make the lips move straight up and down instead of towards the middle of the face.

 

Sphincter muscles: the  mouth and eyes  Represented by Circles where the xyz pos of the circle is exported as well as scale factors (note: hitting reset scale on the mouth or eyes will mess up the sizing of the muscle.) Currently the mouth and eye have the same behavior.  The various parameters: Orientation - this is the direction that the muscle pushes, when your mouth puckers in the image to the right every point moves uniformly in the -y axis. Therefore the orientation is Y and the yfactor is going to get added onto the vert. xyz factors. This is how much the verts are either squeezed towards the center of the muscle or pushed depending on the orientation of the muscle. For the mouth there is a strong amount in the x, and little in the Z. For the eye there is no X motion but a bit of Z motion.  I'm not explaining this as well as I should, so try it out and see what results you get.

For addition info on the behavior see the API docs

Exporting the Muscles:

Run the export Muscle script. things to be aware of: 

• The script ID's things by name so if you start renaming muscles they aren't going to export unless you change the export script.

• If you start deleting muscles with out changing the export script the number of muscles in the Muscle file will be wrong and the reader will probably crash.

Setting up the mesh:

Without biped: 
The system need a specific set up to work properly:

The Actor class system looks for specifically named objects the which are then handed to the Facial animation systems to control. These are head, righteye, lefteye, JawRoot, and tounge. The JawRoot should be parented to the head and the tongue to the jaw. Other wise rotations will not be properly hierarchal.

With biped:
  All most the same thing except that the root parent for the eyes, jaw etc should be the Bip01 Head bone. I suggest that you name your biped Bip01. The system specifically looks for Bip01 Head and Bip01 Neck bones. 

Pivot Points    With the release of the skeletal functionality, most transforms happen in local space. Local space in 3ds max is defined by the pivot point of an object. if you're getting odd rotational behavior with your exported model check the pivots All pivot pivot points should be aligned with the world axis as appears to the right.     That is: the x axis of the pivot should point to the left and right of the model. The Z should point toward the head and the Y towards the back.

Exporting the Mesh:

Select the meshes and the jaw helper object (I suggest making them into a selection set) and hit File>export to binary mesh format.

Setting up and exporting the tagged point data

The eyelids

This is probably the most heinous part of the system. There are 3 selections that the system need to properly function. A right eyelid, left eyelid and a jaw. These selections are shown to the right.
Red denotes a weight of 1, fading linearly to one. The right and left sets should be set up as named vertex selection in the edit mesh modifier. Then exported with the export selection command. 

  The right and left eyelids are actually another parameterized component of the system. The points that should be tagged should include the far left and far right most points of the eye (in the x axis). These are assumed to be a hinge that the rest of the eyelid revolves around. I've had decent results with this.

The Jaw

Is probably the most work to set up. Its a traditional weighted list of points set up with COM_Skin or the skin modifier. Add a Skin modifier add a bone, weight the influences and export them. It can be fairly tedious to do, max 3.0 is just not so good at it.

The exported COMweights command is used to export the data from the COM_skin modifier. The skin modifier may also be used with some slight modifications to the script.

Edit the Results

The reason that these exporters are done with maxscript is because they are very simple. Unfortunately they don't give the easiest to control output. The result of step one and two is a text file that should be combined to look like one of the sample tagged.dat files.

The form is as follows (the comments added for explanation should not be in file)
#lefteyelid unweighted   // name of list and type
49                               //number of verts in list
"102"                            //vertex 1 in list the modifer usually output quoted numbers either on should work
"103"                           //vertex 2 in list
......
#righteyelid unweighted // same bit
49
955
956
.....
#Jaw weighted
293                //number of verts
0                   //vert number
0.2               //wieght of vertex
79
1.0
83
0.4 
......

FAQ:

What's with the red dots?
Those are the tagged points, they are parametrically generated from the above settings and keep the number of points that the system has to deform to a minimum.

Why can't I just use morph targets?
You can, however I should point out the  "parametrically generated" part about. One of the main advantages of this system is that the muscles work regardless of the number of points in the mesh. You can have your character talking before the mesh is finished. and not have to worry about adding verts. 

What about the jaw and eyelid those are tagged points
oops, This is true. The eyelids are pretty easy to redo.  I'm going to sponsor a contest on the best way to parameterize the jaw, Cause weighting those points is a total bitch.