Progress!

Since my last update I have made quite a bit of progress on my animation. I cleaned up what I did previously quite a bit as their were some problems and mistakes whilst also adding a lot more animation to the face specifically. As for the previous problems these included accidental keyframes (only a few!), arms that turned the wrong way and the entire leg sequence which just seemed weird.

As for the facial animation, I started by animating the jaw opening and closing by having a mirror next to me as I worked for reference alongside my rotoscoped video's and pictures. This took a while but was relatively smooth. Next came the wideness of the mouth, again using the same method and going pretty well in my opinion. I did a little work on the eyebrows but I will have to touch these up again at another time. 

Next I plan to animate the tongue followed by the eyes and eyelids. I'm not too worried about the tongue but I think that I will struggle to make the eyes believable. I also want to animate how much he is smiling throughout the animation as it should look more forced towards the end though that will be done last if I have the time today.

An example of the mouth animation

A screenshot of some of my cleaned up animation

My Maya setup featuring a front camera, facial camera, 

side camera and perspective camera

Facial expressions study

This week we were set the task of using the Morpheus rig (from the eleven second club) and displaying 5 important emotions with it. This task taught me a lot about just how much the face moves with emotions, it surprises just what parts of your face move from them. I have run into a problem however as I cannot get the textures onto the rig and thus I have to render it using the Maya Hardware 2.0. renderer which also keeps the rig controls in the render and so the face is slightly obscured. I have all the files saved however so I will update the blog with new renders tomorrow most likely.

Anger

Disgust

 Happiness

 Sadness

 Surprise

Rig change and block out

I finally started my animation today. I also decided on a change of rig after playing more with the Morpheus rig. The reason I decided to change rigs was that Morpheus had a lot of options and I felt for my first human animation that it would be better to use a more simple and user friendly rig to start with so I settled on the Max rig from the eleven second club site.

I took my animatic's screen shots and made them with my rig. At the moment they're not perfect but get the general gist of the animation down. Next I'll be adding in some transition key frames and then going through and polishing it off. 

Animatic version 3

This is my third and final animatic. This focuses on the body gestures and language. I'm really happy with it and I think that it could be really helpful for my final 3D animation. 

Animatic version 3 screenshots

Here are the frames for the 3rd version of my animatic. This one is just focusing on the main character of the animation and his body language and gestures. I think it looks quite nice, having an actual proportioned body that will really help with future efforts on the project. I will finish aligning this with my soundtrack and upload a video of it here soon.

Animatic V3 Progress

I am currently working on a third version of my animatic, mainly focusing on body language using the rotoscoping I did previously. I am over half way through and will finish it by the end of tomorrow. The rotoscoping is really helping me achieve a lot more realism in my animatic and hopefully that will transfer through to my animation.

Rig

So I chose my rig. It is the Morpheus rig off of the 11 second club resource page. It has a lot of customisability, is easy to use and has great facial control which was something I was very worried about. Because of the customisability I won't need to change the rig for the other characters in the clip.