Animation Tips For Smiles
Nailing the right “smiling eye” look in your characters can be challenging – unless you know how the orbicularis oculi muscle works.
Nailing the right “smiling eye” look in your characters can be challenging – unless you know how the orbicularis oculi muscle works.
In FACS, upper lid raiser, or AU5, is the action that raises and retracts the upper eyelid; this movement causes the eyes to appear wider and reveal more sclera (the white part of eye). The appearance changes we see in upper lid raiser are the result of an increase in contraction of levator palpebrae superioris, an extraocular muscle that works to keep the upper eyelid elevated.
Can we really measure smile authenticity? An exploration of the common assumptions we make about expressions of emotion.
Because of its name, upper lip raiser is considered the go-to action for lifting the top lip and tends to get overused in art and tech, acting as a replacement for nasolabial furrow deepener or a shortcut for showing teeth during smiling. Despite its name, upper lip raiser is not the only lip-raising action! In fact, applying upper lip raiser to contexts better suited for nasolabial furrow deepener can be detrimental to the essence of a target expression.
Faces of discomfort often followed headset adjustment – or predicted upcoming adjustments. Bored faces and faces on the contempt spectrum tended to be predictive of undesirable experiences later disclosed during the post-demo interviews. These expressions were not just useful for predicting events. They also served as points for further investigation.
If you are aging a face, pay attention to where you add sagging, deep lines, and folds. There are patterns to follow. While everyone’s pattern is different, general principles still exist. Aging reflects many things – our unique anatomy, our repeated expression use, our past injuries, etc. It is a map of our history.