Trying to find/pose a realistic smile!
wopstickle_278ea2867e
Posts: 2
Hi,
does anyone know of any realistic looking smile pose sets? (On or off the store.)
Everything I've spotted so far is pretty unconvincing; It either looks like the person is working their way through a painful memory (harrold), or is overly tied to a specific model/style.
Probably one of these situations where your brain has a million years of evolution saying "that's a disingenuous smile, don't trust that person!" but even the worst shutterstock smiles are more convincing, and I'm struggling trying to get the face fat and musculature out of creepy territory!
Any advice - on where to buy, how to improve, or some good reading resources on the topic - would be appreciated!
Cheers,
J
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Comments
If you own the expressions packages you can dial the smile in yourself, I usually use a mix of mouth smile, smile open and simple smile (depending on how far the teeth should show) plus mouth corners back and mouth corners down. For a brought open smile the lips need to be bottom in and up top in an up. To make it work over the complete face use the cheek flex
I love this product https://www.daz3d.com/20-unique-smiles-hd-for-genesis-8-females
You need to play around with the different dials and can get tons of different smiles plus add from regular expressions and 3DU characters come with great expressions you can mix in too.
You can't know if a smile is real without context so you can't judge a person's smile without knowing for a long time their 'typical smile'. Now if you want to say DAZ 3D model's smiles are fake because they don't involve all the muscle, connective joint & tissue & skin changes needed then you'd be on to something.
The best products in the DAZ Store that are NOT sculpted to be dependant on a particular character's are Pedro Furtado's smile sets:
https://www.daz3d.com/20-unique-smiles-hd-for-genesis-8-males-
https://www.daz3d.com/20-unique-smiles-hd-for-genesis-8-females
You simply combine them and don't dial them in at full strength. Furthermore, and this is labor intensive, you adjust those smiles using Power Poser & the DAZ 3D model's face fig bones, although that is difficult and tedious to do (and that is what Pedro Furtado actually did in creating his 20 Unique Smiles products to give you an ideal of how much work he did)
The boy in the render below used the above mentioned products & his smile looks quite realistic. I think it was an 20% Smile 01 & 70% Smile 16 but i'm not sure now. LOL, no tedious Power Poser adjusts done by me although if you're trying to get a photograph's peculiar smile down pat you will probably need to adjust in Power Poser.
Yeah, this will be a very, very subjective thing, but I feel that this character with 'signature smile' is one of the hands down more realistic smiles I've used (and used OFTEN to varying degrees).
https://www.daz3d.com/sahel-hd-signature-smile-hd-expression-for-genesis-8-female
I agree that she has one of the most realistic looking smiles I've seen in DS. A lot of them look really articifical.
And her smile can be applied to other models and holds up well. Again, dial it in at varying degrees for variety and effect.
I think, that's hard to find, because smiles are as individual as your characters. That Sahel smile looks great, but only on Sahel.
Sorry allmost every default smile looks below expectations to me. So I gave up looking for expressions.
Making customs smiles seems to be the only way.
step 1: load a default Daz smile or every other smile, that looks useful to you.
step 2: tweak some of the facial bones
step 3: make a final touch up morph with zbrush
step 4: create a new controll slider using the ERC freeze option.
This is, how I've created Roxy's smile.
If you're using G8 try using PowerPose. The cool thing about PowerPose is that you can move the face around to accommodate different face morphs - as it's rare to find "out of the box" smiles that look good on ALL faces, sometimes (many times) the smiles need personal tweaks and adjustment to fit the particular face shape morph. And don't just move the mouth "bones" - to create a convincing smile you need to adjust the eyes and often times the brows as well. Genuine human smiles will usually affect the entire face, not just the mouth.
Keep in mind that a real smile affects not only the whole face musculature, but a person's posture as well, ie: they are often more relaxed, or interacting closely with the other character/s, even if you don't have the other character in frame.
Your best bet is to design the smile yourself to suit the character, poses expressions really don’t always take well with characters they are not designed for and smiles in particular can look strange in pose packs because of this. I stopped buying expression sets because often the positive emotions look a bit ghoulish rather than sexy or happy. Making a personal smile for your character and saving out the expression isn’t very hard and is well worth the effort in the long run,
Smiles need customisation. They can actually take a while to get right for a particular character; this is especially when it is for a closeup.
Unfortunately, because of the way morphs and presets work, any premade smile is very dependent on the character you put it on.
Fortunately, some authors do create corrective morphs for the standard expression controls to make them work their best on that character, although it's regrettably not universal, and so a smile that may look great on one character can look devious, painful or just forced on another.
(What I find particularly irritating is the deep curves at the corners of many model's mouths, which then don't stretch out properly with a broad smile, making them look like a comic book villain).
You will often have to use additional sliders or adjustments to facial "bones" to try to make expressions look their best on a character.
~~~~~
How hard it is to get a really good facial expression on a character (particularly their smile) is probably the main factor in whether I buy from a particular artist again; custom smiles and MCMs are a big selling point for me.
One of my most used characters actually uses an only slightly, and very carefully, modified default G8F head shape, albeit quite well disguised under different materials, specifically so that any expression designed for the default head works its best.
At the risk of singling out the confirmation bias answer, I guess this is the reaity of the situation.
Lots of helpful suggestions, and thanks for posting them, but without some major tweaking, none of them feel quite right. Strange how many female smiles were suggested, but I'm actually after a male one, pretty much leaving only "20 unique..."
Masterstroke said:
step 1: load a default Daz smile or every other smile, that looks useful to you.
step 2: tweak some of the facial bones
step 3: make a final touch up morph with zbrush
step 4: create a new controll slider using the ERC freeze option.
...
Might be a plan, thanks. I'll look into that.
Gonna look like a crazy person if I reply to every reply, but thanks everyone who contributed - some really nice points made!
I'm always searching for the perfect Expressions or Pose packages. I've found some decent ones. I have a wicked sense of humor, and like my characters to be absurdly happy.
Hah, that works in context - pretty infectuous smile!
Thanks. It was actually from a "canned" set made for those older Genesis 8 males.
One of the major things that make the smile work better on Floyd there is the needed wrinkles that make a smile realistic are sculpted into Floyd's base character even without the smile.
The problem with most smiles is that they are just mouth. That is a disingenuous smile. A real smile affects the whole face. The chin, the cheeks, the forehead, the ears, and especially the eyes. The only solution I found was to take my character, and work on a smiling face until it was perfect, then saving the whole character as a preset - not just the "smile" expression. Then when I need the character to smile, I load the figure with the built in smile. It helps to start with a figure/character that already has the potential for the type of smile you want.
Fauvist, that expression set does include the entire face.
Yes and no. Fake smiles are really not hard to spot, even on total strangers. It does vary from person to person, some people just have better acting skills. There is a reason why there are tropes related to certain people who have used car salesman smiles, or conman smiles. Its a thing.
I do think most Daz smiles are way over the top, like the model just had laughing gas. This is probably because of facial structure, too. But I also think that many people in the 3D industry over compensate when they create smiles, not just Daz PAs. It is kind of like how animations and things are exaggerated in cartoons and 3D animations, it carries over from that. Sometimes a subtle smile is really hard to do, because it can be hard to notice the person is smiling at all just toning the dial down. It is a real delicate balance.
The Bluejaunte girls all have great smiles, and they DO work on other characters. However you have to be careful because if you apply too much of it then they start looking a bit too much like the Bluejaunte characters, and that gets creepy, LOL. Blend the smile in with another smile, or even 3 or 4 smiles in small amounts. For example, maybe 30% Sahel + 40% of another smile, or something like that. Any kind of combination can work. You can also add in a dimple shape morph if you have one to customize it more.
Also, the same person will have a wide variety of different smiles. They can look different from day to day. So if you are doing a series, try making small changes between shots to alter things up a bit. Just like having different characters with the same smile can be creepy, having a character with the exact same smile in every picture is also kind of creepy.
Convincing, realistic smiles are hard to achieve as other have stated in this thread - mainly because most of the canned morphs do not alter the whole face geometric...tho some do. The only way I've had any luck is to go with a closed mouth smile (I know it's cheating). I use a blend of various morphs. Examples attached for what it's worth.
I have 2 smiles, a natural one (to different degrees of strength) and one I try to force for passport photos anbd such when it's apparent on'e not just going to pop out like they usually do. The fake one I can only recall using 3 times in my entire life so I don't think they are that common place to use really unless you are Cher or David Letterman or someone like that. I have never forced a fake smile for a person, I'm not capable of it. I worked as a busboy for a decade and never tried to fake a smile or portray false emotions directed at customers or other workers. I have done fake smiles for a camera though when the camera was dominating my thoughts more than the photographer taking the picture..
Those are really good and a common way to smile so it's not really cheating.