Avatar - Which Lachrymal Liquid Accumulation Method ?

[Kel Solaar]

Hello,

I have a question for the guys on this forum that took part in Avatar project ( Pascal, Richard, etc ) since it's the new CG reference film. How did you handled ( if it's not under NDA ) the lachrymal liquid accumulation between the eyelids and the eye ?

I'm currently working on a full CG animation film here, and we are exploring different solutions but they have all their problems :

- Modeling : A mesh done like a fillet between the eyelids and the eyes either dynamically generated in nurbs or in polygons with wrap / blendshapes to drive it ( that's the solution we used on Ne Te Retourne Pas with my mate NZO ). Problem is that it's really time consuming to deploy at large scale on a lot of characters.

- Shading : an occlusion / proximity detection system is driving some fine displacement / shaders at the contact of the eyelids and eyes : it's really easy to extend on a lot of characters, but lack of controls :)

Waiting for your replies :) You can contact me at kelsolaar_fool "aatt" hotmail "ddoott" com if you don't want to spread the information.

And of course everybody experience on this particular task is welcome !

KS

[michel.g]

coucou Thomas :)

Which renderer do you use ? have you think to plug a mia_roundcorners (for mental ray) into your cornea shader ? there is also VRayEdgesTex for vray, and for renderman I'm sure they have something similar (3delight have it I read).
For a better effect I duplicate my head geometry and put the same shader (or similar) to the duplicated head ( I kill the non usefull geometry to make it lighter and wrap it with the main geometry), then you can control the propagation of the effect with a map.
It's not the avatar solution but I hope it will help you :)

[Kel Solaar]

coucou Thomas :)

Which renderer do you use ? have you think to plug a mia_roundcorners (for mental ray) into your cornea shader ? there is also VRayEdgesTex for vray, and for renderman I'm sure they have something similar (3delight have it I read).
For a better effect I duplicate my head geometry and put the same shader (or similar) to the duplicated head ( I kill the non usefull geometry to make it lighter and wrap it with the main geometry), then you can control the propagation of the effect with a map.
It's not the avatar solution but I hope it will help you :)

Hey Michel :)

Long time no see ! Glad to see you around :) We are currently using PRMan. On your modeling process you mean that you are using kind a polygonal surface extraction from the eyelids contact part ?

KS

[michel.g]

no, the mia_roundcorners do that just at render time . An other idea ( I just try it and seems to work well ) is to create a toon outline (maya) just for the intersections , so you get a tube between the eye and eyelid, convert it in polygons (keep the history) then put the shader you want ( with some bump or other to break the regularity).

[Kel Solaar]

Thanks Michel, I didn't thought about the toon, I'll do some tests :)

KS