Tag Archives: facial animation

Class 5 Week 1 – Critique Notes

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I got my first critique for the term from Mario yesterday and I have to say, it was absolutely fantastic! It was so good in fact, that I just had to tell someone, anyone! I couldn’t have hoped for better – plenty of detail about stuff to fix, but really motivational! It made me feel so inspired about working on my shot and making it better!

For your reference, here’s what I handed in last week:

I will now relay to you, all the things I need to sort out:

Mouth

  • The synchronisation of the mouth to the dialogue seems to work well already.
  • Push the intensity for some of the expressions – “Edgewise” has a perfect level of intensity but there are a number of places where the face needs to match just how intense the dialogue is, for example “sake” and “after all”.
  • “Can’t a girl” – Needs more ‘bounces’, either with the jaw or lips. Perhaps it needs to be faster as well? Maybe reduce the jaw rotations here and concentrate on the lip shapes instead.

Brow

  • All the phrases of emotion are reading really well already.

Eyes

  • Generally everything is working OK so far.
  • What is she looking at on FRM18?
  • Add in some minor eye adjustments/movement.
  • Perhaps re-time the blink at FRM30 – it happens too soon before “What’s the big idea?”

Body

  • Watch that head jerk at the end of the animation – “my public too!”
  • Bring the head down in the pose at FRM155 so we keep her eyes towards camera – don’t disconnect her from the audience.
  • Are the eyes shut too long at the end of the animation? Changing this could involve a reasonably large modification to the final pose – something to discuss at the Q&A.

Overall

  • Push the intensity of the facial expressions. Try going a bit crazy and see how far you can push it. The dialogue is very over the top so try to match that in the facial animation. Bishop has a very elastic, cartoony mouth – perhaps watch some Bug Bunny and other Looney Tunes stuff to see how they do it.
  • “Can’t a girl” – Good brow asymmetry, try doing it on the mouth as well. Think about it in terms of Squash & Stretch – one side of the face stretches whilst the other squashes down.
  • Remember to keep the whole face working together as one unit.

B+

There we go then! Plenty to sort out, but on the whole it’s working pretty well. There are a few things I want to discuss at the Q&A this week, such as what he meant about the ‘bounces’ because I understood about ‘reducing the jaw rotations and concentrating on the lip shapes’ and also what other possibilities exist with regards to changing the end pose as that might have quite a dramatic impact on the animation.

If you guys have any additional things you think I need to sort out, let me know!

Class 5 Week 1 – Planning & Assignment

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Here’s all the sketchbook planning I did for Week 1′s assignment. This week’s lecture was conducted by the lovely Jason Schleifer, who is now Head of Character Animation at Dreamworks (a website that my ancient PC does not enjoy visiting!). Regarding the lecture itself… let’s just say I was impressed.

First up, we’ve got the phonetic break-down of the dialogue:

c5w1 - Sketchbook 1

Or rather, the dialogue written according what what mouth shapes are needed to make the sound. For example, you tend not to write things like ‘W’ (as in “what’s the big idea?”) – you actually make the same mouth shape when saying ‘w’ as you do if you said ‘ooo’. It adds an additional layer of complexity/thinking than just writing out the line using phonetics.

I’ve highlighted the most important sounds, these are the ones that I have to hit if I want the dialogue to read clearly, and also made a note of where I think there will be a pretty significant change in mouth shape over a very short amount of time (anywhere there’s a diphthong, for example).

Now it’s time for some terrible drawings!

c5w1 - Sketchbook 2

Amazing, right? I can only apologise! It’s just a basic idea of what expressions I wanted to use over the course of the line. As long as it conveys the emotion, it doesn’t really matter how good (or in this case, bad) the drawings are. As you’ll see, I’ve actually already deviated from this slightly in my blocking phase.

c5w1 - Sketchbook 3

Mario suggested this quick way of nailing down some basic jaw rotations – take the dialogue line and think about how open the mouth will need to be at various points and sounds.

Man, that new Animation Mentor logo thing is really annoying! Anyway, here’s my first pass of the facial animation for this shot – I’ve just tried to block in the main phoneme shapes and expressions. I know the body still requires loads of work – I haven’t touched any of that since last term, mostly because I moved house yet again this week, so I wanted to dedicated the limited time I had to just concentrating on the face. I’ve also included a ‘head cam’ shot so you can take a look at the facial animation without everything else to distract ;)

The curves for the facial animation are all clamped; I haven’t done any refining of those nor have I done anything with the tongue, cheeks or nose yet as I wanted to make sure the basic sound shapes are reading properly first. There’s also almost no eye animation at the moment (I think it works reasonably well already?) and there’s some basic blinking going on.

Thanks for reading! As always questions, comments or critiques are more than welcome!