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Tutorial

A Quick Guide to Modeling/Animating in Facade
By Ronny Kim

Let us begin by taking a look at the user interface for facial parameters in facade. 

At first glance this window can be pretty daunting, but it's actually pretty intuitive once you get used to it. Before you start this tutorial, go ahead and make changes to each parameter one by one to get a feel for how the face moves and for how much control you have over the face. Remember that you can click and drag in the facade window to spin the head and look at it in three dimensions. Notice on the right hand side of the window you have the option of selecting either "Both," "Left Only," and "Right Only" for your parameter controls. Also notice that some of the parameters gray out once you select either "Left Only" or "Right Only."

After you've played with the controls a bit, and you've made a face that you're happy with, go ahead and type in a name for the face in the blank box next to "Filename." Here I'm going to call my face "skeptical," since that's the expression I was going for.

Click "Save" and you now have a face added to your library. At any point in time you can type in the name of this face and click "Load" to bring it back. One of the key features of Facade is that it allows you to read just parts of faces in the library. 

For instance, if I made a new face and wanted skeptical eyes on that face, then I could just check the box next to "Read Eyes," uncheck the boxes next to "Read Mouth" and "Read Face," type in "skeptical" in the Filename box, and click "Load." So here I've put skeptical eyes on an old man character that I created.

Now that you're familiar with the modeling aspects of Facade, let's try to make some animation. Download my skeptical old man library file, place the file in your "Library" directory and load him up in Facade. Now go to the Animation window and click on the button called "Write Key." This writes a keyframe at frame 0. Now let's change some parameters on the face. Making sure that the "Both" option is selected, change the rotation values for "Neck X," "Neck Y," and "Neck Z." Let's also close his eyes so set the "Lid" value to 0 for both eyes. Now select "Left Only" and raise the left corner of his mouth by slightly bringing up the value of "Smile" and "Lip Corn Y."

So now we have the skeptical old man with some slight changes made, as shown on the screenshot on the right. 

In the Animation panel, find the empty box next to "New Frame," type in 30, and hit the "Write Key" button. This made a new keyframe at frame 30, one second later than the previous keyframe. Now make some more changes to the face. When you're done, type "60" in the New Frame box and click "Write Key." Now click "Play Anim" and watch your animation.

Okay, so now we have two seconds of rather poor animation (Facade runs at 30fps), but you can go back in and add in-between keyframes at will. Basically, whenever you want to create a new keyframe, just type in the number of the frame at which you want the new keyframe to be in the "New Frame" box and click "Write Key."

Now let's say you messed up the timing between frames 0 and 30, and you wanted there to be three seconds between those two keyframes rather than just one. Well go to the Animation panel and set the "Scale From" to 0, the "Scale To" to 30, and "Scale Fac" to 3 

Click on "Scale Anim," and you'll notice your animation is now 120 frames because you tripled the amount of time between your first and second keyframes.

In the Animation window, obviously you can step through your keyframes by clicking on "Next Key" and "Prev Key." Another important attribute, however, is the "Frame" box. Here you can type in any frame number of the animation and see what that frame looks like. You can also click on the arrows next to the box to scroll through the animation one frame at a time to detect where any problems in your animation may exist. If you wish to delete a keyframe, simply go to that keyframe and hit the "Delete Key" button.

Well, that's about all you need to know to make great animation in Facade. Remember you can animate by either changing the parameters yourself and setting keyframes, or by simply loading up different parts of different faces located in the Smart Library and setting keyframes. Good luck and happy animating!