Here’s a quick clip of Obama, Mandela and Serkis playing the same Plug. This is the first version of a new Plug system that uses curves to build the individual sequence PlugFrames. It also uses the Speech Engine 3.0 system, which is still a work in progress.

Until recently, the eye blink system was fairly basic. It involved two animation cycles, one for eyelids closing and one for eyelids opening. The first cycle was timed to be slightly shorter than the first and they both used basic ease in/out curves.

But ultimately the results were as basic as the above description.

Eye blinking is actually reasonably complex and fairly variable in nature. I came across some research that helped influence the newer eye blink system.

This system is designed to use the curvature of the lips to affect the skin around the face, as is common in human speech. Although it’s a series of muscles that do the deformations in an actual human, lip curvature is used in our system to simulate this movement.

During MTP setup, each vertex on the head mesh is assigned a sibling outer lip point. This is essentially each point’s nearest outer lip point….