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-).