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

Another 11 Second club analysis

http://www.11secondclub.com/competitions/july07/winner

Animation from the 11 second club: July 2007


         This animation is interesting, although simplistic, it contains a lot of nice subtle movements in the hands and eyes. It is well timed, such as when the letter is opened and contains real characterisation. The use of the letterbox is nice to think about as the addition of a prop, something for the characters to intewract with other than themselves is something that can add a lot to a scene. The animator has clearly put a lot of thought into the little things here and the secondary action is incredible. I would really like to see this animation rendered out properly though. Looking at it again, there seems to be some small issues when the character on the right is moving towards the other character but it is mostly unnoticeable due to the well animated expressions on the character's faces which draw the viewer in.

         The movement of the lips themselves could be better as I feel that the synchronisation of audio to action is slightly off. The story is clear and looking at the other principles of animation, it is clear that squash and stretch are present on the character's faces as they speak, allowing for a higher and better sense of realism. The use of arcs is great as well as the characters move fluidly when turning and rotating their heads, arms and uperbodies. One final criticism that I have would be that the character on the right seems to have some movements and facial expressions that conflict the tone of voice making it seem slightly strange. I noticed this mainly around frame 20 with the character on the left. The character should possibly be slightly less calm about the situation when he says, "We have to."  
       Overall though, it is a nice, well timed animation in both body and face that was worthy of winning the competition that month.
          
              

Interesting Paper on Facial Animation and the science behind it

Facial Animation is an important part of this semester and so I have been reading up on the subject. Here is a paper that contains information on everything from muscle modelling to blend shapes and was quite enjoyable to read. It contains diagrams and the writer writes about pros and cons when dealing with the process of 3D facial animation. I found a lot of interesting things in this and I will continue to search for more relevent research papers in the future.

  http://graphics.cs.uh.edu/website/Publications/2007_facial_animation_survey_bookchapter.pdf

Interesting Animation Blogs

http://pixartimes.com/   

1. The Pixar Times is the first professional animation blog that I want to write about in this post. As one of the most influential animation companies of all time, it is interesting to read about everything that is going on with them and their research. Constantly updated and dealing with the vast empire of films that are in their collection, this blog covers characters and films with articles that link to the animation processes and research ideas. 

http://www.speakingofanimation.com/

2. Speaking of Animation is a blog that was created by four professional animators.  who work in industry. They give news about the world of animation in their posts as well as providing inspirational elements and educational bits on animating. They don't update the blog very often though and so the site suffers from a lack of regular material but there are still videos with interviews and industry related information.


http://www.animationphysics.com/

3.  This blog is a free educational site for animators. It deals with information from traditional 2D animation to 3D computer graphics and stop-motion related material. It contains lots of information on providing context to how the principles and laws of physics apply to the world of animation. Unlike the others on this list, it is less news related and more focused on teaching. It provides multiple tutorials, some of which i have looked at, The tutorials are organised into four categories for easier access and understandung, basic animation, character animation, effects and character effects animation and lighting and visual effects. Looking through these, it is clear that this blog contains some very nice content.

The modelling process

 I started off by creating the outline and a basic mesh with pointed ears and basic lamberts so i could visualise the images that I was working from.

 Following on from this, the character's face had to be molded a bit more to the shape of the character but still basic and generic.

 I mirrored the generic mesh and began to work on it some more, whilst manipulating both sides.

 I retopologised the character to try and fit the likeness a bit more. At this point, the humanoid features were getting closer.

 Extruding downwards I began working on the arm and hand. Two fingers and a thumb are all that Nightcrawler has on each hand so it was easier to use the extrusions on the fingers.

 Moving on, I mirrored the mesh again and joined up the central vertices, creating a basic clothing mesh.

 I had also made a tail at this point and soon began moving onto the hair. The hair was an extrusion that had been seperated into a new mesh. Following this, I had some of my classmates speak to me about the progress of my model and redid the arms based on this as I had accidentally made square arms instead of rounded ones. 

 Here is the fixed arm setup in rough mode. I made sure to retopologise at this point as i worked on the cave of the inside of the mouth and added nostrils, teeth, a tongue and eyelids.

 Finishing off the mesh, I worked on the hair and nails and fixed any small issues in the character's jaw etc, making sure to speak to other people in order to see how my progress was going. I then went on to fix any issues in the clothing and lower body before I was happy with the mesh.

I then used basic textures to create the character look, trying to make it like the comic character style that I had planned when I chose the character.