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What our customer's say!

"Don't buy it", Hi, everyone.

I bought this book. It's a huge disappointment for me. You beter buy the anzovin studio tutorial DVD's and look for a freeware JAVA applet called JLIPSYNC, use MIMIC or VOICE O MATIC This book makes it way to complicated.
Basicly all you have to do is analyse your vocal track roughly not word by word or letter by letter. That doesn't work. Try to analyse your track phonetical and see where THE LIPS AND THE MOUTH CHANGES. LESS IS MORE IN LIPSYNC. Add eyebrow wrinkles and nose up or down movements. Look at the pose your character is in. SEE THE LIPSYNC TOGETHER WITH THE POSE YOUR CHARACTER IS IN. That will work.
Reading this book won't.


"Buy 2.", I am a 3d professional artist for a long time, I have to say I have read hundreds of books, watched hours of training videos, read pages of internet tutorials anything related to 3d animation. No other training material comes even close to things I have learned reading this book. It is a treasure that you have to keep somewhere close to your desk as a reference, whether you are modeling a character head, building blend shapes or rigging . I have used the techniques successfully in many projects. I thank Jason Osipa for writing this book and for teaching me how to build superior 3D characters. This is my second SS book, I also have the first edition. This 2nd edition is a lot different then the first.

"Stop Staring -- Good Buy!!", Stop Staring: Facial Modeling and Animation Done RightThis book is a very good resource for computer animators.

"An indispensable resource", Have you ever worked with a facial rig that was based on a set of sliders in the viewport? Many of the most popular free rigs use that method these days. Well guess what -- it's sometimes called "the Osipa method," and it was popularized by the first edition of this book.

As a novice character rigger, this book opened my eyes to an entirely new way of looking at facial modeling, rigging, and animation. I can not recommend it highly enough. These days when I create a character, I always have two books within quick reach: The Art of Rigging (by CG Toolkit, only available from their website) and Stop Staring.

"nothing spectacular", I hate to say this, but didn't learn much more than which I had already been able to get from online tutorials and forums.

Read this reviews before You buy...

"Good tips, annoying style", This book has a lot of useful information but the author's somewhat patronising and self-congratulatory tone sometimes makes you want to stop reading. Let me give you a couple of examples from the very start of the book (note that these are quotes from the actual book's text, not "marketing" material):

Introduction: "You'll learn much of what you could learn elsewhere while also picking up more pertinent valuable information you couldn't learn elsewhere."

Page 3: "They saw how I took something so complex, so daunting, so evil, and made it so easy, simple, and - dare I say it? - fun!"

Page 6: "It's very easy to learn how to do this, but very hard to master; luckily you have a good coach."

In addition to this, a lot of the book's contents are about... the rest of the book's contents. Some chapters start with several paragraphs about... the rest of that chapter. And many paragraphs end with "cliffhangers" (ex., "This is not necessary; I'll explain why in the next paragraph.", when he could simply move "This is not necessary" to that next paragraph and explain straight away). The overall effect is a bit like an infomercial.

Having said that, the book does have some very good tips about animating and modelling realistic human faces (and especially about how to model them so that they are easier to animate). The examples use terminology from Maya, but people used to other 3D packages will have no problem understanding them.

Cartoon-style characters are also covered, but the models used are mostly humanoid and fairly realistic (think anime), so if you're interested in ways of conveying emotion with more extreme (or more abstract) characters, you might want to look elsewhere (ex., George Maestri's books and videos, Looney Tunes cartoons, Uderzo's drawings, etc.). The modelling tips and techniques described in this book will probably still come in handy, though.

Bottom line: this is one of the best books available on the subject of facial modelling and animation (granted, there aren't many). As long as you manage to get past the patronising attitude and the unnecessary "build-up" of some chapters (both of which are worse at the start of the book - or maybe I just learned to ignore them), you'll almost certainly learn something, even if you're an experienced animator.



"Great Great Book", This is a great book has everything I need to learn and to know about 3D Animation. I'm so happy for this book :)

"I wish he had more info on the cartoon characters", Personaly I find them more interesting and there seems to be more demand for that type of animation in movies and ads.

"DEUCEDLY FINE BOOK!", I can't possibly say enough good things about this book and its author! The first thing which struck (and stuck with) me is that Osipa is an animator first and foremost; Osipa spoke my language from the first page! Basically, he simplifies the many elements which go into facial animation and has come up with a virtually fool-proof yet expandable system based on combining several blend shapes at a time into an extremely flexible series of facial expressions! Previous books either left me marooned with a gazillion blend shape sliders, or otherwise barely explained the process at all in any clear terms. Osipa's book concentrates on facial animation as it applies to lip sync and facial acting!

Using his own head as a model, Osipa also takes the reader through a quick yet very complete facial modelling course, which concentrates on modelling the head with animation in mind and avoiding many of the pitfalls we might otherwise overlook. Particular attention is given to the eye area, the mouth area, and less obvious but equally important areas such as the teeth and eyebrows (all of which figure in to quality facial animation). Subsequent sections deal with the blend shape process and modelling the various expressions themselves. His advice here is priceless, and he constantly reminds us of basic facial proportions and relationships and how they change as the facial expression changes. He also applies these "rules" to more cartoony heads. ALL of this is well-represented by examples on the accompanying support CD. There is very little room for error!

Perhaps the most important feature of this book, however, are the chapters concerning the rigging and weighing of the head, and setting up the facial controls (things many animators tend to shy away from). Had it not been for Osipa's book, I probably would have shied away from the expression editor entirely...no one had ever explained how it works in any of the other books I've purchased...but Osipa eases the reader into the magical realm of creating expressions. To make it even easier, the support CDs contain the control sliders and expressions. All I had to do was copy and paste them, and Lo! it worked! By seeing expressions in action, I tried a few of my own and they worked as well! Osipa should be covered in gold for this chapter alone!

Finally, Osipa presents his own take on how to approach lip sync. It may or may not be to everyone's liking, but it does work and it is well-founded on what real dialogue looks like on film. Rather than the traditional phonemes (where the facial expressions are based on the sounds one usually hears), Osipa uses "visimes", a more visual breakdown of a dialogue. Instead of vowel/consonant sounds, he explains visimes in terms of "open", "closed", "narrow", "wide", &c. His control system, however, can be used for both his "visime" method as well as the more traditional phoneme method.

I've said a lot already but there are a few more things I wish to share with potential readers of this book. ALL books have a few warts, and this one is no exception, but the warts are few and very far between! The most significant "wart" is that some of the support files were written for older versions of Maya and may not work on newer versions, but Osipa maintains a website with updates, and perhaps newer editions of the book have already addressed this. Another relatively minor inconvienience is the flow of the book. One must jump ahead a few chapters and then back a few in order to build the head, which can make things a bit confusing the first time through. There is a method to this madness, however, and with patience and repeated readings (you WILL want to read this until you've memorized it!), it isn't a problem. There are one or two places in the book where Osipa's wonderful sense of humor might temporarily confuse the reader, but studying the support files cleared up most of my own confusion.

Perhaps the BEST thing of all is Osipa himself. When all else failed and I still couldn't figure something out, he actually answered my e-mail questions! He is an author who supports his product, and will endeavor to help all who ask. I've practically worn out my first copy of this book but not in vain! Once mastered, the contents of this book will bring a new confidence to any MAYA animator and open up a whole new world hitherto available only to a knowledgable few! If I could give this book six and a half or even ten stars, I would! Bravo Zulu, Jason Osipa! WELL DONE INDEED!!!

"Lost in the woods without this", I recently finished a big project that required sync and realistic facial expressions, and reading this book was like being bathed in a pure, heavenly light. Osipa guides you through the creation of numerous plausible blend shapes and helps you avoid the most common errors. Before I bought this, I was doing everything wrong. The range of emotion that this system is capable of expressing is near total, and certainly enough for any project I can think of short of a major motion picture.

Don't make the same mistakes I did the first time around. Unless you have years of instruction on human anatomy in motion under your belt, buy this book before you attempt any kind of lip sync or serious facial animation. It will save you from the pain of building inaccurate shapes and watching your character painfully contort into each of them to strain out an expression. The information Osipa provides on lip sync in the age of computer animation is very, very valuable to someone like myself who has tried to sync in the past and failed. The facial rig that the book provides in the attached CD and the automatic scripts that apply it are, alone, worth twice the modest price of the book.

I have a lot of marginally useful books on 3d that contain just enough information to cash in, but this resource is clearly heartfelt. Osipa wants to teach you how it is done and his easygoing style makes it a pleasure to read.