Thursday 21st February 2013

 I have reached the stage where I am making certain tweaks so that my model is ready for animating. I duplicated this model and was shown how to add a blendshape to my model, however, it was done so quickly that I did not see how it was properly done.

 One side of the rigged skeleton.











Both sides of the skeleton. I tried to duplicate it so it would mirror on the other side, so I just had to copy the joints manually. I remembered just in time that I needed to animate my arms, so I added joints in the arms.

The completed skeleton. There are joints in the lips so I can open and close them in accordance with the mouth shapes.

Friday 15th Feb 2013

 This is how I managed to create the inside of the mouth. I found an online tutorial as I found the instructions written by the teacher too confusing. I selected the inner lines of the mouth and then just move them back and scaled them up to create a cavity, while always keeping an eye on the shape of the lips and outside of the mouth.

http://anytimereference.com/content/page-02-modeling-mouth-and-lips-maya-defining-space-within-mouth : link used to create inside of mouth

I then got around to texturing. I did try to use UV mapping but found it too hard to understand and accomplish. So instead I just used normal Lamberts and selected particular faces to colour in. I made the eyes a slightly lighter colour to distinguish them from the mask, and also coloured the inside of the mouth so there wasn't just a blank, grey space.

I'm very pleased with my output from this session. I hope to get on with creating controls for the mouth and bones for the head and arms to make it move realistically.

Thursday 14th Feb 2013

This was created in class. I was focussing on creating the inside of the mouth. However, to do that I needed to re-shape my mouth as it was just a hole in the faces at the front of the model. It took me a while to get it right, and to get the inside of the mouth was a real chore. I didn't manage to attempt this in the lesson, but I was able to smooth out the arm joints and the front of the chest.

I was also able to create eyes and use a lattice to shape them better. I have decided not to animate them and use them purely to put a break in the mask which will be added later.

Monday 11th Feb

I decided to go in to university and make some progress on my model as I fear that all my time will be used animating, trying to get the mouth movements right. After today's session I'm feeling more confident with this project, but we'll see how it goes!

I loved how everything went quite smoothly in the creating of this. I also liked how I could just duplicate one side to get the same result. Some tweaking still needs to be done, on the chest and the shape of the arm. The arm is just a tad too short as well so I will see to that in the next session.

Session 3 - Beginning to Model

In this session, we began modelling. I had my useful reference images and from this I proceeded to start modelling from a sphere, extruding and bending the shape where necessary. However, when one of the teachers came over they suggested a different way.They started off with a cube and added extra divisions to make it easier for shaping later. After this, we lined up the cube with one side of the face on the image, which was behind on an image plane. To add shape to the head, selecting the vertices and moving them individually to match the image behind was the better way to do things. I added quite a few edge loops so I could modify the face in more detail.Once I was happy with the shape, I mirrored it so the other side would be the same. When I made little tweaks on one side, it happened in the mirror image on the other.

I was about to finish up for the day when I remembered my character had ears. At first I just selected some faces and pulled them up. However I wasn't able to put any edge loops around them. The way to do it in the end was to select the faces again but this time extrude them and shape them that way. This produced a much more desirable effect.

For the mouth, I selected a couple of faces where the mouth would be and then deleted them, tweaked the vertices at the sides of the gap and modified them to look more like a mouth. Hopefully in future sessions we will be adding controls that will help us move the mouth correctly and without having to select vertices to animate.

Facial Animation: Storyboard

This is my storyboard for this module. I wanted to use it for working out mouth movements and transitions between scenes. Also to give the quote a bit more character. This project is really going to test my animating and modelling abilities.

Facial Animation 2013 - Weeks 1 and 2

Week 1

This first session was just to get an idea for the course and get us to start thinking of a character and a quote to animate. This was much more difficult than it should have been for me; I had a quote but couldn't think of what my character could be, and also it didn't help I was confused as to whether or not the character should be a superhero or if it was just an example.

We also spent time re-signing up to Flickr so we could share and show work. We spent time looking at examples of past work and competition winning work for character animation, getting an idea of how every little movement counts in both the face and arms. Arms are very useful for getting the idea of emotion across, also for emphasis of a situation.



Week 2:

This session was used to get used to the software again. It's been a good year since I've used Maya, so I spent most of my time getting reacquainted with where tools were, but I was also able to complete the task we were set, making the face of either Wallace or Gromit. I chose Gromit, and while he may have been a bit square I was still pleased that it looked like him to some extent and that I was able to create that within half an hour. Within that time, I also spent time looking for suitable references but in the end I went with my own image as I've seen the shorts and films so often they're pretty much engrained on my memory.
After this, we found an image from the internet and then spent the rest of the time in the session to draw on edge loops to make the image more 3D and also give us an idea of how many polygons go into just a face.

After this session, I was still looking for a character to animate, and not really understanding what we were supposed to do. However, after reading the Module Handbook, it became clearer and I have now chosen to do Catwoman. I feel I could create something suitable and passable with this character and my chosen quote combined. It took me ages to find a suitable reference image (georgejurard.blogspot.com) for the different profiles of her face but I finally found a good character sheet and took screen shots of the profiles individually so they could be made bigger when needed. My task now is to create a storyboard to plan out movements and also work out a schedule for production (and post-).