BonyFace is a professional solution for rigging and animating facial expressions on 3D Faces with ease and flexibility.

BonyFace is a 3dsmax Script (max 2008 and up) developed between us Fx,lda and www.scriptattack.com to drive custom 3D Meshes with a rig based on a Bones System to simulate how real muscles behave in a real face.

DEMO VERSION NOW OUT : CLICK HERE TO GET IT

TO BUY BONYFACE THROUGH PAYPAL PLEASE GO HERE

LIMITATIONS OF THE DEMO ARE AS FOLLOWS:

1. Controls work only in frames from 0 to 99.
2. Additional windows: Setup Rig, Poses, Drive, Face are unavailable.

RELEASE INFO

There will be two comercial versions of BonyFace:

Standard - unlimited controls plus 2 additional windows added: Setup Rig and Poses. Price during Promotion Period: 300 USD

Extended - unlimited controls plus all 4 additional windows added: Setup Rig, Poses, Drive, Face.  Price during Promotion Period: 450 USD

If after the purchase of the Standard Version you decide you need to upgrade to the Extended version, all you have to do is pay the difference in price.

Some of the Highlights of the tool include:

Rigging and Skinning

The Splines phase allows the user to properly "map" the face with a spline based system where they will later be replaced by the bones system that drives the whole face for unlimited facial expressions and deformations.

Works with the internal skin modifier of 3dsmax and intelligentely auto-weights the points of a 3D Face to provide you with a perfect base on muscle deformation.

Bonyface's intelligent weighting automatically recognizes several regions of a face and applies proper weighting to the vertices according to where they are in the face, for example the vertices in the upper lip and lower lips get proper assignments allowing more time to tweak the rest of the face without having to worry about setting up correct weights in these areas. Samething happens on the eyelids, it knows what vertices belong to which eyelid and weights them accordingly.

Since it uses the internal skin modifier, the user can then tweak the bones envelopes as they normally would, to get an even better deformation for their character, this however in most cases is not necessary.

Direct and Soft Controls

Using a system of standard max circle shapes, blue(direct) and yellow (soft) colored, the user gets UNLIMITED deformations on their 3Dface, this is one of the great features that sets our tools apart from other available plugins and scripts for 3dsmax

The Direct Controls provide immediate deformation of skin regions.

The Soft Controls have a weight system that globally change the position of the direct controls.

The Face UI

Using an Integrated Face User Interface, the user does not need to select the controls directly in the viewport even though this also is supported.

Using a number of selection features,one can simply click on the desired Control, be it soft or direct, and move it with  the Green Control Box below to position it.

The Pose Tool

With the Pose tool, you can easily save numerous poses of your face and with the provided View Window or Poses List you just DoubleClick on the required pose in a given time and you have just made a quick animation using several saved poses, allowing you more freedom over the standard use of morphtargets for example.

The Drive Window

The Drive window provides you with a layering animation system also based on 3dsmax animation layers, a special autoblinking layer feature and mocap reading abilities

The Autoblinks Layer allows you to use previously setup Eyes_Open and Eyes_Closed Poses to automatically generate EyeBlinks along a certain period in time. this is perfect for character that need to be "alive" but dont require specific animations to them.

The Mocap Layer  can read BVH mocap (currently tested only with Zigntrack's BVH), it includes numerous options for reading the bvh file format, including custom weighting of mocaped points mapped on to the direct or soft controls of the BF rig, along with the captured rotations of the head as well.

Since its a Script, the user can freely share the BonyFace rigged character with another professional NOT having BonyFace, this other user can still have access to the rig although not with the FACE UI or BF features.

VIDEOS

English Videos

Initial Setup

Splines

Rigging and Skinning

Russian Videos

Splines

Rigging and Skinning

Rig Setup

Animation Layers

In the following days we will be posting more videos soon showcasing some of the other features mentioned above