Major: Animation Progress 4

I have blocked out a little more of my first scene. I think I need to bring my main camera in closer, and there is another camera I want to set up that is close in on the face, which I will cut to around when I say "invisible".

Major: Animation Progress 3

I've added a few more steps and done a tiny bit more with the face in the first few seconds.

Major: Rendering Tests

I thought I'd check how the toon shaders work, now that I have some animation on my rig. I am glad I have checked, because there were some issues.

The problem is that, with the teeth and tongue in my character's mouth, if the mouth is open, the lines around it don't render correctly. I was thinking it must be a setting on the toon shader, but I can't find anything that makes it work how I want. I have included an example below.

With the mouth empty, the lines render how I want them to.

As I would render the lines and fill colours separately, I can hide the teeth and tongue for rendering my lines, but keep them for the fill colours. Which gives a good result.

I need to recolour the lines after they have rendered, as they get a light coloured outline around them, but I would need to do this anyway.

As I would be rendering the lines and fill colours separately, this isn't really a problem, but I was thinking of having lines around the tongue, and I am not sure how this will work - I need to do more tests.

The render time for a close up shot, for the lines, is around 3 minutes per frame, at the moment. It is still changing, as I am working out the best way to set the line width - I will need to adjust the settings for each shot, but will come up with a list of settings for common shot distances that I can refer back to, and keep the lines consistent. For animated shots, I think I will use the method I devised during Minor, that adjusts the line width according to the camera. It may be more efficient for render time, to plug this in, take note of some values and key them manually.

I also realised that some of my blendshapes weren't rendering correctly in the render view or through render sequence, the blink being most noticeable. I was able to fix this by unticking the GPU override box in the animation preferences. The first GIF is the initial result I was getting, and the second is the fixed version.

Major: Animation Progress 2

I have added a few more steps to the scene and started working on the face. I can see that there is one step in this that is particularly dodgy - the first step backwards. I tried to block these few steps out more sparingly, but I think it would have been better to have at least one more key pose in there while I was blocking out. I will try and find a balance between adding too many frames right away, and not enough.

For the face I have just started with the first word, to get to see how the rig looks in action. I did also start adding a jaw bounce for the second word, but I think I have over done that. From this point I will go through and do the jaw bounce and work on blocking out the facial animation, rather than going right in with details.

I've had a few glitches, but nothing too big. The one below just seems to appear when I move frames around, and goes away easily enough when I carry on working.

Major: Sticky Eyes Problem - Fixed

I had a problem with my sticky eyes again, but I think it is all working now.

The problem was rotating my character caused the sticky eye blendshapes to turn on, as the eyes I was using for my set driven keys moved with the orient constraint. This meant that if my character was turned sideways, but looking ahead of itself, the sticky eyes behaved as though the character was looking sideways.

The problem is more obvious in this image, through the Face_Cam and with the eyelashes hidden - the look-left sticky eyes are enabled here.

I was able to resolve this by grouping the eyes from the rig again and using an orient constraint to turn them with my character's head.

The eyes turn with my character now, so the rotation values are on this new group, rather than the joints that are driving my blendshapes. I have played around with this setup and think it has fixed the problem without causing any new ones.

Major: Animation Progress 1

Here is a few seconds of animation progress.

I have just focused on the body for now, it still needs work, so any feedback would be appreciated. For now I am going to block out some more key poses and start on the face.

Major: Reference 2

I have put together some more of the reference I filmed the other day.

I have also recorded my face lip syncing to my audio separately, but I did it quite a few times so I'm still in the process of picking the best clips. I will still keep all of the videos I took, ready to use as a guide, so that I have more choice - although I kept doing very similar things again and again, when I meant to try something different.

Major: Reference 1

I filmed some animation reference for my film. I am still working on fitting it together, but this is the first scene, so far.

Some of this is a bit of, but I think it will help me a lot with timing and some of the bigger movements. I was having some trouble walking my character backwards and sideways.

Major: Selection Interface

I have been working with character sets, but have decided that a selection interface, like the one made in class, would help.

Due to the large number of facial controls, I wanted to have the option to hide these buttons under one heading, as well as in sections.

Major: Rig Demo

I've made a demo video for my character rig. I think I will also animate the character moving between some faces/poses and render it.