Category Archives: Animation Mentor

Class 5 Week 4 – Assignment & Critique – Part 1

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I’m going to split this post into two parts, otherwise it’s going to get overwhelmingly long [matron!].

Wow, what a busy week! Those of us in AM Class 5 are moving on from our single character dialogue shot to, that’s right you guessed it, our multi-character dialogue shot! It’s going to be pretty manic as we only have 8 weeks to get it done – are we really 4 weeks in already? I guess that means it’s been a whole month since I left SCEE Cambridge. Weird.

Anyway, before we get to the multi-character stuff, here’s the facial expression exercise I did this week:

c5w4 - Sketchbook 1 v3

It took me quite a few tweaks to feel really happy with this one. The original photo doesn’t have a particularly strong Line of Action down the face – if you compare the previous versions, it should be fairly clear that I decided to accentuate it. You might argue that I’ve actually inverted it but doing it this way means I can squash down the screen-left side of the face and stretch the screen-right side. Either way, Mario was really happy with it and didn’t have any changes to suggest.

I feel like I’ve got a really good grasp of the facial rig now. Mario’s been impressed with what I’ve been able to do with my facial exercises and keeps asking whether I’ve done any “funny business” to the model to get the achieved look, so I should take this opportunity to say: I’ve not used any additional deformers, sculpting techniques in Maya or post-processing in Photoshop! Everything you see here can be achieved using the default face rig and controls! Winnarz don’t use performance-enhancing… things! ;)

Critique Part 2 coming soon!

Class 5 Week 3 – Assignment & Critique Notes

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Apologies for being a bit slow with the updates this week, I’ve been doing a lot of drawing (as you’ll see in a later post). I’ve back-dated this post so it’s listed as last Sunday. Here’s what I handed in:

And that’s it! No more time to spend on this animation right now (until Class 6 at least!) – it’s on to bigger and better things! Regardless, Mario still had to critique it, so here is what he had to say:

Mouth

“This is REALLY good stuff!” but there’s still room for adding a little more intensity to the “can’t a girl” section and perhaps either on “after” or “all”.

Brows & Eyes

Again, really good stuff. Full of nice beats and feels really solid. The brow changes feel like they’re coming from her, not me as an animator.

On the “can’t” expression, it might be possible to accentuate the asymmetry and squash and stretch of the face by swapping the eyebrows round to help define the line of action through the face.

Body

The new end pose is much more stylish, a lot clearer and easier to read. There are still opportunities to polish up the hip and shoulder movement, but that can wait for Class 6!

Overall

This is a great shot. It’s clear I’ve got a lot of experience already and there are only a few little this to shape and polish up; all the foundations are there and very solid. This shot is pretty much done!

A-

My first A-grade for the term! Woo! As I said earlier, I’ve been super-busy getting my drawings and layouts done for the next hand-in, so I’ll post those up when I get a spare moment!

As ever, please feel free to leave comments, questions or suggestions! Thanks for reading!

Class 5 Week 3 – Dialogue Mid-Week Review

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Just a quick mid-week update on my shot. Mario told me to “go wild” with the asymmetry and elasticity of the face in my critique, so hopefully this is moving along the right lines:

The second clip shows the new version (left hand) against the version I handed in on Sunday (right hand) – I know it’s hard to see a difference (especially when Flickr won’t let you can’t frame-by-frame it), but trust me, they’re pretty different!

I showed this to Mario in our class Q&A yesterday afternoon and it seems like I am going in the right direction with the cartooniness of the face. Mario seemed happy with what I’ve done and told me to push it even further (which I have actually done already – I playblasted this late last night), so that’s good!

We’re meant to be finishing this shot by Sunday and as I said previously I’m actually away this weekend, so I don’t have much time left. The things I still need to do are:

  • Animate the tongue
  • Check the jaw/lip bounces on the “can’t a girl” phrase
  • Clean up the facial anim curves and add some subtle lip overlap
  • Adjust the hips and line of action for the end pose
  • Clean up the head movement at the end
  • Ensure the head movement propagates down the body
  • Any final tweaks

Not much to do then! 8)

Let me know if you have anything to add to the list!