Is it possible to render just the animation of the mouth and lips?

FrankTheTank

I want to animate just the mouth and lips of a Genesis 8 figure, and then render just that, so that I can layer it onto a 2D figure outside of Daz studio. But I can't figure out how to do it. Is there some way to hide all parts of the Genesis 8 figure except for these areas, the lips and interrior of the mouth? (I would prefer for no teeth to be seen as well, just a black interior of the mouth and and the lips). Its for combining with a cartoon type figure. Is there some way to turn off visibility by surface area? 

Richard Haseltine

Use the Spot Render tool, set to render to a new window, then save as Tiff or PNG to make it easy to stack . As I recall there has been some work done to make this scriptable, since you obviosuly wouldn't want to have to do it manually for each frame, but there isn't currently a sample script and it may be a thing that isn't yet implemented (or is a figment of my imagination).

Quasar

On G8, you can hide all the individual body parts that have a bone by clicking the eyeball icon for each one in the scene tab. Any surfaces in the surfaces tab, like the face and head surfaces, can also be hidden by setting the cutout opacity setting to zero. This should leave you with just the lips visible, but it probably won't look right unless the camera is facing directly at the lips. There's also a part of the lip surface that folds up into the mouth area, so it sticks up above the top lip once the other surfaces are hidden. You might be able to use the geometry editor tool to select those extra polygons and hide them. If you can get just the lips showing the way you want them, you could render the animation on a black background and probably get something you can use.

WendyLuvsCatz

one possibility is to texture the figure with matching opacity maps to get what you want

bring the face and mouth etc textures into Gimp, Photoshop or image editor of your choiice

add a layer and use the original as guides to. draw on the layers the mouth etc you want
 

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I myself would use something like EbSynth, it renders png series with alpha too

https://ebsynth.com/

in otherwords render your talking face then draw over a frame with your desired animation then add it to key and your series to video and synth it

JB007

Richard Haseltine said:

Use the Spot Render tool, set to render to a new window, then save as Tiff or PNG to make it easy to stack . As I recall there has been some work done to make this scriptable, since you obviosuly wouldn't want to have to do it manually for each frame, but there isn't currently a sample script and it may be a thing that isn't yet implemented (or is a figment of my imagination).

Being able to spot render an animation would be a God-send for me .. please tell me this isn't a figment of your imagination Richard! See what you can find out! 

FrankTheTank

ok, thanks for the tips, but I actually found out the best way with some experimentation, in case anyone else is interested. this is the only method that allowed me to see just the lips and interior mouth with nothing poking through where it shouldn't.

Basically i needed to alter the face skin shaders to make it a "chroma key green", but this wasn't so easy as any shadows will cause the green screen to fail in post. So you can't just make the skin green with fantasy shaders or something like that, because it just doesn't work with iray to be completely solid green. It has to be completely evenly lit. So after a lot of failed attempts with lighting setups, I figured out the solution was emissive skin.I'm still tweaking the settings, but its pretty close to perfect for what I need. Now If I can just figure out how to save it as a shader preset to reuse on other figures I'll be all set.