Flynn Rizza😶😶

POSING TUTORIAL: FACIAL EXPRESSIONS

Helluu! You know the moment when you think you found the perfect pose for your story/gameplay but the faces look… uhm… a bit… off?

Yeah, I know.

When I first started making poses, the facial expressions were the hardest part for me. Because no matter what I do, I felt like they don’t look like the way I wanted them to look like. After many many many (many) hours spent in Blender, now I can achieve the emotions I want and I thought, HEY LET’S SHARE SOME TIPS&TRICKS YOU WISH SOMEONE TOLD YOU WHEN YOU FIRST STARTED!!

1. The View Mode

This is probably the most crucial part, at least it was for me. When you open Blender, you see your rig in Perspective mode, and it means it looks distorted. I know some pose makers prefer this view mode, but for me, it’s impossible to get the emotions I want when Blender is in this mode. So what should we do? We should switch the view mode to “Ortho”. Go to “View” menu, Click on “View Persp/Ortho” or just press 5 (Numpad). 

2. The Brows

Brows are where the magic happens! Just with a few minor tweaks, you can change the default face in so many different ways, even without touching the other parts of the face.

3. The Lids

Eyes wide open for a totally shoketh look, or slightly closed lids for “You bore the hell outta me” mood. If you close both the up and low lid slightly, here you go you’ll have a “I’m gonna kill you but I can’t yet decide how” look.

4. Closing The Lids

Okay, this took me long time to figure out but I’m finally happy with the results! Guess what, when you close the eyes, our beloved eyelashes CLIP! I KNOW! It’s terrible. It’s a disaster. Oh the time I’ve spent trying to fix the clipping in Photoshop… Anyway, there’s a way to avoid that. Just move the up lid forward a tiny bit with G after closing it.

Closing the eyes are a good way to show intense emotions. Combine it with different brow and mouth movements and you’ll get a wide range of emotions.

5. The Jaw 

When posing the jaw, make sure you lock the W, X and Y axis before you open the rig’s mouth. In order to do that, press N and click on the little locks next to W, X and Y. That will prevent jaws to run wild.

Combine an open mouth with flying brows and open eyelids, and you have a surprised face. Change the brows a bit, you have a “oh no, not that again?!” face. Slightly close the lids and change the brows again, now you have a mad mad face in front of you.

6. The Mouth

The mouth is tricky ladies and gent… If you over-do it, it will look hideous. So try to be subtle when moving those points. There’s a fine line between a natural smirk and the whole Strangerville mood.

The same goes for the sad faces too. If you drag the mouth corners too much, it won’t look natural. Just a little tweak would be more than enough especially when combined with matching brows and eyelids.

7. The Lips

Okay this is the fun part! Don’t hesitate to play with the lips! They can add so much to a pose. Use the “G” key for dragging the points around.

8. The Eyes

People rarely look at something directly, so when you’re making poses, try to avoid the default eye placement. Move them around.

9. Now combine everything!

Go wild!

POSING TUTORIAL: NATURAL POSES

Hewwoo!! Welcome to posing tips & tricks with Bee vol. 2! (You can find the first one here [x] ) This time, I gathered up some tips for natural looking poses. Let’s go!

1. Shoulders

Do you see the difference between this and this?

Yes, I can see that too. The Clavicle points make all the difference my friends. They are your friends, they are nice, they are good for you. So please use them. Let’s start over, step by step:

2. Spine

Bend the spine gradually. That’s all. (At least it’s easy to remember lol) These points should look like they are bent gradually, I mean, unless you’re trying to achieve the other one…

3. Height Difference

When making poses with height difference, the most important thing is stretching multiple points subtly, so the overall proportions can be preserved.

When selecting symmetrical points, like ankles, first select one and then, holding shift, select the other one, then use the blue arrow to stretch them simultaneously (so that they would be even). 

4. Reference Pics

I don’t usually do that, but having reference pics is good when you’re making complicated poses. 

After adding your reference picture, you can make your complicated pose more easily.

5. Listen to Blender

Okay, this is maybe the easiest but most crucial tip: If you’re trying to bend or twist something, and Blender makes it look bad, it’s most probably because what you’re trying to do is anatomically incorrect. Let’s say, if you want to twist a hand, you should start twisting it from the shoulders, again, gradually.

6. Mind the Gap!

Another crucial tip especially for making couple/group poses, don’t make them touch each other tightly. If you leave a subtle gap between them, you can prevent clipping in game. There are two reasons for that, first, the physical features of your sims are usually different than these rigs’, and secondly, these rigs are (almost) naked, you gotta leave some space for clothes.

7. Take breaks!

Okay I know it’s not exactly a blender tip but try to rest your eyes in every 30 mins, and by resting, I mean look at somewhere else, stand up, take a walk to the kitchen or bathroom, open a window, look at the sky. Staring at all these little dots is tiring for your eyes so try to give them a break once in a while.

–

I was scrolling through Tumblr and came across a post of KNOWN PEDOPHILES ON TUMBLR (many of which have or want to rape actual children/minors)

THERE ARE ACTUAL PEDOPHILES ON TUMBLR TRYING TO GET IN TOUCH WITH MINORS ON TUMBLR

Okay, this is a method I use to ‘cheat’ a bit making poses, so it’s faster and easier on myself. I don’t know if anybody else uses this; but this tutorial presumes you know a little bit about using Blender and S4S.

There are numerous resources out there to get you started with pose making, like this video or this tutorial.

It’s a bit long winded for Tumblr, so I’m sticking the rest of it under this cut. My tutorial assumes you know how to make a pose .package in S4S and focuses exclusively on the actual pose-making part of it.

I call it ‘frankenposing’ because much like frankenmeshing for clothing, I actually take parts of EA clips, expressions, gestures, etc, and put them all together to create something new.

Step 1: Open a blank rig in Blender. Just trust me on this one. You’ll need to have a blank rig sitting somewhere in your recently opened files.

Step 2: If you don’t already have a desired EA clip sitting on your drive somewhere, you’re going to need to go grab one. Go into S4S as if you’re making a new pose, head to the ‘clips’ tab and select ‘EA Clip’ and the desired frame before hitting ‘export.’

Step 3: I’m doing a walking pose, so I look up ‘loco’ in the list of animations to find the walking clips. I look for one that seems pretty good for what I have in mind and then I export it.

Step 4: Save your EA clip somewhere you’re going to find it again. I have a bit of an EA animation library going now.

Step 5: Go back to Blender and your blank rig. Go to File>Open & find that clip you just saved. Open it up in the same instance of Blender. Now you can roll through the animation clip by using alt-mousewheel and find part of the animation that best captures what you want. I want good walking legs for this one, so I try to find the best part that expresses the energy of that motion to me.

Step 6: I hit ‘B’ and select the area of the pose that I want to grab. (In this case, the legs.) When those points are highlighted in blue, press control-c to copy.

Step 7: Go to File>Open Recent and find your blank rig. You have to do this in the same instance of blender, or the copy/paste won’t work. That’s why we’ve been working only in one instance of Blender so far.

Step 8: When the blank rig opens, press Control-V and voila! The legs are now in a walking pose for us! You can, of course, tweak them at this stage if you need to do that for your pose.

Step 9: This one is important. If you forget to do this step, you’re going to have to go back to square one. We press ‘i’ to bring up the animations interface and select ‘locrot’ to lock our joints into place on the timeline. Then we go to File>save. Save your new .blend clip as something where you can find it again later to put into S4S when you’re ready to create your pose pack.

Step 10: Now we’re going to go to File>Open and find another EA animation clip to blend! I’m going to go for a talking one that grabs the emotion I want for this pose. In this case it’s a ‘debate’ clip.

Step 11: Once the new animation is open, we find the point we want to copy again and then hit B to select the area we want. Here I’ve just gone for the whole upper torso, but you can zoom in on facial expressions, grab a hand position, whatever you need. Once the joints are all highlighted blue, press control-c to copy it.

Step 12: Now we go back to File>Recent Files> Your working file and open that back up in the same instance of Blender again.

Step 13: Once that file opens, just press Control-V again! There we are! It’s an instant pose of somebody arguing a point while walking. Of course you can tweak it further at this point; maybe move the eyes to look another sim, or even add another facial expression altogether if you’re not happy with this one.

This method works very well with multiple sim poses or you can use it to augment a pose that you’ve made from scratch - like if you don’t know what to do with the hands. I frequently open clips of sims just chatting to each other to grab hand gestures or boxing (for closed fists) and ‘cheat’ the hands on a pose using this method because they’re fiddly as hell.

Do NOT forget to locrot and save when you’re happy with it. At this stage you can carry on blending more clips into your pose, or just leave it as it is and save it.

That’s it! It’s that simple!

Happy Simming,