Modelling the scene and creating the blendshapes

            

                     In order to create the scene for my animation, I thought about how I planned to animate the character talking into a mirror almost threateningly. This made me think about the Travis Bickle character played by Robert DeNiro in Martin Scorsese's "Taxi Driver." I decided that the modelling of the scene should reference that slightly and look like a small apartment that is shabby and run down. It contains a pan on the wall, some small shelves and other kitchen appliances such as an oven, sink, table and chairs. I added some basic polygons as bolts on the doors and lit the scene from above, adding a camera that would rotate around the character at the end of the animation. A bump map was added to the walls in order to create a more painted wall effect.


              Creating the blendshapes would be a fairly new process to me as I had never done it on a facial animation before. I had only really animated using them on polygon primitives. Firstly after a bit of research, I figured out how to create them but there was an issue with the mesh pulling forward on itself and so I was forced to rerig and reskin the character before recreating the blendshapes. The blendshapes are actually a great resource and I like how two or more blendshapes can be merged together to create a new shape. Something that I discovered about the process is that the verts relate in a one to one correlation and due to this, deleting any part of the mesh, will cause the verteces to reassign themselves randomly, ruining the blendshapes and making them unusable. (I now know from experience).

         Using a blendshape guide recommended by a classmate, I was able to create the basic phonetic mouth shapes and paint the blend shape weights so only the face would contain the deformation.  

                 These mouth shapes would help to create the words needed to replicate Liam Neeson's voice.  I also created blendshapes for basic emotions such as happiness and sadness and blendshapes that create blinking effects and adding a deformer to the tongue.

Here are some examples of my blendshapes.

 Angry

Happy

 

I feel that this process went well as even though I had the frustration of having to recreate the shapes, rig and skin, it taught me a valuable lesson about blendshape workflow and how to best optimise it for greater animation results. Soon, I will write about the animation process.