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Features

This screenshot shows the elements of Facade GUI: visualization, parameters, animation, camera, and command line interface. Some features such as lighting, texturing, and lip-sync are activated using text commands. Here is a walkthrough the different features:
Visualization Tool (gui)
Facial Tool (gui)
Animation & Rendering Tool (gui)
Camera Tool (gui)
Lip-sync Tool (command line)
Texturing Tool (command line)
Lighting Tool (command line)

For more information:

Go to the Facade Tutorial (html)
Download Facade Documentation (pdf 2.4MB)

Visualization Tool

wireframe shading flat shading smooth shading

Facial Tool

Eyes, Mouth, Face: 51 facial parameters modifiable in real time.
Save: Save the face parameters to the library. These parameters completely define the face.
Load: Load a face from the library.
Read Eyes: Filter the load operation so that only eye parameters are loaded form the library
Read Mouth, Read Face: same as above
Screenshot: Generate an anti-aliased (5 passes) screenshot of the current visualization. The view is saved as a ppm* file in the Shots folder.

*ppm: portable pixelmap format. This format can be converted to other formats (tif, jpg) using standard tools like Paint Shop Pro or Photoshop.

Animation & Rendering Tool

Keyframe Controls: Write key, Delete Key, Scale Keys, Next / Previous Key.
Load / Save sequence: The entire animation will be saved / loaded in the Anims folder.
Playback control: Play Anim will play back the sequence at 30fps.  The animation can also be played frame by frame for finer control.
Batch render: render all the frames* in ppm format (see screenshot feature above) in the Movies folder.

*You can use Quicktime to generate a movie from this image sequence. 

Camera Tool

Camera manipulation:
UP - rotate up
DOWN - rotate down
LEFT - rotate to the left
RIGHT - rotate to the right
HOME - zoom in
PAGE_UP - zoom out
END - increase the camera's field of view
PAGE_DOWN - decrease the

Keyboard command for camera's keyframe control:

c -- print all camera keys
ck <frame #> -- add a key
cd <frame #> -- delete a key
cs <nlf> <ff> <lf> -- scale key firstf-lastf to firstf-newlastf
cw <filename> -- save keys to a file
cl <filename> -- load keys from a previously saved file

Lip-Sync Tool

More info on the Lip-Sync page.

Download and install the CSLU speech toolkit, if you haven't done so already.
Record a .wav file
Generate a .sob file from your .wav file (and the text of whatever is being said in the .wav file) in the BaldiSync program which comes with the toolkit.
Run the lerp.tcl Tcl/Tk script to generate a .lips file which contains lipsync params for every frame of the utterance, as well as a .wav file which is named correctly. Put your .lips file and the .wav file into the Anims folder.
Enable lipsync by typing "le mylipsfile.lips" into the facade application, where mylipsfile.lips is the name of your .lips file generated in the preceeding step. (click on the visualization window first to enable keyboard dommands)
Create an animation which plays enough frames to allow the entire utterance contained in your lipsync to play.
Press animate!

Texturing Tool

You can also texture the face you are working on using Facade's texturing feature. Note that texturing can only be enabled via the keyboard for now.

In order for a texture to be used in Facade, it must be in bitmap format (BMP format) and it must be found in the main Facade directory. A number of templates for generating textures can be found in the main Facade directory also - they are called facadetemplate*.bmp.

Click on the visualization window of Facade to enable keyboard commands.
Enable texturing by typing "t mytexture.bmp" into the Facade application, where mytexture.bmp is the name of the texture you wish to load. To erase something you wrote use the delete key, not the backspace key.
To turn texturing off, type in "t" with no parameters.

Lighting Tool

Click on the 3d window to enable command-line mode.Type in 0 or 1 or 2 or 3 or 4 or 5 and then enter. This will enable the light. To disable it, do the same thing, press the number and then hit enter.

0 - back left from the bottom
1 - front right top
2- front right bottom
3 - front left bottom
4 - front left top
5 - back

 

last updated Monday, March 19, 2001 by nico