Facial tests

This is the facial rig in a mostly done state. I need to add articulation to the eyelids to get more expressiveness out of them, and I need to add controls for the cheekpits, tongue and the outside of the orbicularis oculi which helps sell winks and squints. This rig is made with a combination of wire deformers for general movements and clusters for finer articulation. The lips have separate translate, rotate and scale pivots so each action can have a different pivot and different falloff.

Still going...

Last post I talked about progress on the face rig and the skinning. That progress showed me several areas in the mesh that needed improvement so I back tracked and made some topology changes in the face and torso. While I was at it, I decided to do some adjusting of some of my joint pivots as well as adding in some helper joints that will be used for preserving volume. Though this does set me back in my progress, I think that this rig will benefit from the changes; and that's the whole point, right?

Long overdue progress.

Finished hooking up the face controls and the initial weighitng pass. After posing this guy, some problems became apparent in both the weighting and the mesh. I know my poor lighting job doesn't make it clear, but the upper eyelids are a bit lumpy in the area that leads up to the brows. The shape of the nose gets muddied up when I lift the nostril. I'm pretty happy with the mouth. The corners of the lips need some work but i'm liking the center of the lips are working out.

I'm trying to avoid correcting things with Blendshapes as much as possible for two reasons: I want this setup to be able to work in a game pipeline, where we are all joint driven, and this character has been an exercise in learning to model for deformation. I want the Rig and the Topology to carry the deformation and only use Blendshapes to augment, instead of correct.

Feedback is always welcome in the comments or you can email it to me as well. This is certainly a good learning experience for me.

4Mations Contest Runner Up

A month or so ago I submitted my short film "Furnick" to a online competition at www.4mations.tv. I just got back from my time off to discover that I was a runner up in said competition. Woo!

Starfish Ninja is coming

Just want to get the word out to the small handful of you who read my blog. My good friend Joe Daniels has been working on a trailer for a personal project called Starfish Ninja. He started this project a couple years ago and has been working on it in what little spare time he has had.

I've been giving him a hand with some of the rigs in my free time and I can't wait to see the progress he makes. Keep an eye on that blog for more news on the project.

Anmation!

About a year ago I was working on a different kind of face rig based off of these tutorials. With this set up using nurbs curves to deform the mesh, I created this animation to an audio clip from "What About Bob?"



The model was done by Josh Piejko. So about a year later The Face Machine is released which is an face auto rigging tool that was developed by my good friend Jed Mitchell. This rig uses very similar concepts as my nurbs curve face rig, but it takes it several steps further in the way it deforms the face. The automation is easy as pie too. It takes me about 10-20 minutes to rig a character's face using this tool. So what I decided to do was to revamp this monkey model and rig it using the Face and Setup Machine and try to polish the animation as best as I could. Here is what I ended up with.

if you can't see the videos you can check them out at http://www.mytoons.com/evadceivorus

Final Animation!

Animation!

Blocking out the timing and poses. It feels good to be animating something that is more....me. My last clip I animated was too forced. I forced the characters into a situation and the animation came out flat. This, although it may not be profound is much more natural to me. I'll post more work in progress as it comes.

BEOWULF.....in 3d?

We went to see a free screening of Beowulf last night in San Fran and.......at least I got a free pair of glasses and a free bag of popcorn. I showed up about 15 minutes late because I was coming from work in Redwood City, and the show still hadn't started when I got there. They had been fiddling around with the projector trying to get the 3d aspect of it to work. All we ended up seeing was a double image even with the glasses on. After about 20 minutes of that they had thought they fixed it (the titles looked somewhat 3d) and they let the movie run for about 20 minutes ignoring the fact that anyone who was close up in the frame was still showing up as double imaged. After fiddling around for another 10 min or so they called it quits. There was no regular print so we didn't get to see the film at all. That was a bummer. From what I saw though it looked like it could be a decent movie if they just used the real actors. The CG was too much in the Uncanny Valley to really get into. The facial expressions were flat, and the design of Grendel was awful (it is possible to have a character be gross and ugly and still have good design). I think that if I had the chance to see this for free again I would. I don't think I'll be paying to see it. And if they ever want to make this story into live action I will be there on opening night.