With the advent of Version 2 Mimic is No longer just a lip sync program. with the addition of gesture and expression tracks, Mimic 2 Pro is now a full featured facial animation pose creation system. In this section we will discuss the gestures timeline and its uses.

1. The layout

OK lets take a look at the Gestures Track, on the left you see a list of basic gestures (step 1) involving some of the primary features of human expression. above it a window indicating a Key value for that gesture (step 2), or rather that gesture at a certain point in the timeline. And to the right the timeline is represented by a scale graph track (step 3). Simply put, for each of the gestures you will place points, refered to as Keys, along the timeline at different heights to control the strength of the selected morph. these points are called Keys becouse the spot in the timeline in which they are placed is called a Keyframe. basicly a keyframe is one in which a control action occurs all other frames are considered between frames and are interpolated from the Keyframes they are between, thus the name between frames. If you put the Key above the Zero line you will have a positive morph if the point is placed below the Zero line you get a negative morph, at that point in the timeline, string them all together and you can create a transition of your gesture as smooth or abrupt as you want.

2. Adding a Key

Ok lets see how it works. click to highlight the first gesture, Eyebrow Raise Left (step 4) . this is not strictly necessary, as this gesture being first on the list is selected when you open the program. But its good to get in the habit. Next you are going to click on a spot in the timeline . But make sure it is past the darkened in area of the timeline this section can be considered as a leader of sorts and is not part of the animation, which you can see by the fact that there are no frame numbers above it in the timeline(step 5) . If you put a Gesture Key within this section you will not be able to manipulate it, and it will not affect your animation except to be an anchor point for your Gesture Track. But you are better off placing your first Key at frame 1.

3. Deleting a Gesture Track

Oh by the way, if you activated any of the gestures in the session manager (check boxes at the bottom of the manager) Mimic 2 will have already created Gesture Keys for the checked features. But removal of those Keys is fairly simple just right click (or Command-click for the Mac) anywhere on the Gestures Track, click on "select all" (step 6) and hit "delete", and you will have a clear Track.

4. Adjusting strength using Key Value

Ok so we put our first Key at frame 1 on the zero line (step 7). didn’t get it exactly on the line? Well here is where the key value comes in. You will see in that window that there is a positive or negative number depending on whether you placed the Key above or below the line. Go ahead and select the key value and type in 0 and enter (step 8) . Now your first point is directly at zero. The key value is an indicator of the height of the selected point on the Track. And you can use that to make a precise positioning of any selected Key.

5. Adding Keys

Ok now scroll the timeline over to the left till the first frame is at the left edge of your timeline, this will give you some space to work. You will also notice that the number scale remains visible in the Track (step 9) .
Now we are going to make another Key in the timeline I will place it at frame 15 for our demonstration and at the 1 line which is at the top of my gestures timeline. if you do this, you will notice immediately that the 1 line has dropped down to the midpoint between zero and the top of the timeline (step 10) , what has happened here is that the timeline vertical scale adapts to the height of your graph and will always zoom out vertically in order for all the Keyframes both above the zero line and below to be visible.

6 Manually adjusting Keyframes

Now that you have your second Keyframe, lets adjust its level, there are two ways to do this the first is by setting its key value, by typing in a number into the "Key Value" box, and the second is to adjust the Key manually, simply click and drag the Key to the level that you want the morph to be (step 11) . If the red frame indicator line is near the Key that you are manipulating you will be able to see directly the strength of your setting in the display window. but don’t place your point directly in the frame indicator line (step 12), as it will be difficult to select the Key for manual manipulation. If your Keyframe is not at the proper point in your timeline, you can also drag it forward and backward in the timeline.

7. Changing Between Keyframe Characteristics

Ok lets go ahead and create some more Keyframes in the timeline. And as you can see the lines curve gracefully from point to point. And if you are observant you will notice the sideways u in the small box that represents the Key(step 13). Well if you went through the Phonemes tute you will remember that these boxes were used there as well. And just like with the phonemes you can change this icon by right clicking (command+click in Mac) these different icons indicate the Interpolation Method of the line that controls the between cell strength. Simply put Interpolation is a system of calculating the strength of each between cell based on a line (or Spline) between each keyframe, so each of the wave forms is an Interpolation Method. Here it’s a little clearer to see what effect it has changing the morph strength setting. For review you have a selection of four options: Flat, Linear, Smooth, and Extra Smooth. Flat will give abrupt transitions between Keyframes. if you change it to this setting on the Track you will get strait Horizontal lines which jump to the selected Key from the previous cell (step 14), linear will give sharp diagonal transition. On the graph this is represented by strait lines directly connecting Keys from the previous Key to the selected one (step 15), and the smooth and extra smooth will do varying degrees of gradual curves between them on the graph this is represented by a smooth curve going from the previous Key to the selected one (step 16). Changing these settings always effects only the transition between the selected Key and the one which came before it. At this point you might want to "select all" and click between the options to see how they affect the wave form along a whole Track.

8. Changing Tracks

So far we have dealt with just one of the gestures and you can go on to set the levels across your whole animation based on your phoneme and text tracks. When you are done with the left eyebrow you can go on to the right eyebrow by simply clicking to highlight it in the left window (step 17) . What happens here is that the timeline window changes to show the specific Track for each gesture though you may not notice the change unless your gestures start very early in the timeline. This is done to save space on the timeline. So each facial gesture’s track is only shown when that gesture is selected.
You can then go on to create animation tracks for each of the named gestures, the eyebrows, Eye Blinks, head movement in any direction, and eye movement, these gestures are available for both the right and left side. So you have the opportunity for a lot of adjustments to these features.

Unless you are creating a new configuration file from scratch you will probably not have any reason to change the definitions for your gestures but you can do so by double clicking on the gesture title and changing It just as you did the phonemes. Because Mimic 2 was designed to be able to automatically assign animation tracks for these specific gestures the titles cannot be changed and no additional gestures can be added. Though the morphs they control can be changed.

To add morphs that are not either phonemes or gestures you will want to use the third option but for that you will need to read my next tute, Mimic 2 - the Expressions