Ideas Generation

I had feedback from someone in my class on different animation ideas for the Taken clip that I am doing. Here is an image of the various new ideas.

Rigging and Skinning

 The rigging process was fairly straightforward this time as I used an autorigging system, "Advanced Skeleton" in order to rig it. http://www.animationstudios.com.au/advanced-skeleton. I tried to rig the face with the same program but this didn't work out si instead I decided on blend shapes as the animation method.

 Here is a shot of the eye rigging which was created using an aim constraint. I worked on the Jaw and fixed a few issues before painting the skin weights seperately. At first, I had tried auto skinning with advanced skeleton but it didn't work how it should have so I did it as a new skin.

The skinning process basics. 

                                                                   Skinning the spine.

                                                       Rigging and skinning on the tail.


                                               From here, I will work on the blendshapes.

Blend shape examples

Here are some blend shape examples. I am now working on creating the blend shapes for animating my model. Most blend shapes seem to deal with elements such as the mouth and eyes seperately. The mouthmakes phonetic shapes for various letters and the face is then distorted to fit with various facial expressions such as Anger or sadness, with a rest pose.

 As for the eyes, they can be done seperately or together. An example of this would be doing the eyes half closed, open and then a blink as I will do for my character.   

Here is a real world example with squash and stretch on the character. Here the tongue movement is clear as is the rotation and curving of the lips. Using the verteces in the mesh, you can manipulate them to affect the shapes of the finished model. It is substitution.


BLENDSHAPE TROUBLESHOOTING:     An issue that I had with the blendshapes at first was that I was duplicating just the head faces rather than the whole mesh. It turns out that doing this will reorder the verts so there is no longer a 1 to 1 relation so the whole mesh needs to be duplicated, with any further duplication coming from the first duplicate. It is thankfully interactive though so the verts can be moved after the blend shape is applied. Using the "Front of Chain" advanced blend shape option also makes it so that the shape comes before the skin in the heirarchy. 


Image references

Image 1:   http://www.francescolupo.it/works/otto/otto016.jpg
Image 2:   http://userpages.umbc.edu/~bailey/Courses/Tutorials/ModelNurbsHead/images/Phon-Typical.jpg
Image 3:  https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/564x/88/3e/0e/883e0e8b97198f63ee3e00f767b9da0c.jpg