1.9 Week 9 – Donatella's 3D Computer Animation Blog

Introduction

This week, Nick gave us personalized feedback on our lip-sync animation. In order to improve my work, he suggested to go over again the skin weights and smooth the transitions. So before creating my phonemes’ blend shapes and working on my lip-sync animation, I painted again my skin weights.

Part 1: Paint Skin Weights

This time, I made sure to smoothen the skin influence on the edge.

In this sense, instead of only having black and white parts on my face rig, now I have also grey ones.

Part 2: Phonemes

After painting the skin weights, I moved on to my lip-sync animation.

The first thing I had to do, was to analyze the phrase my character was saying in order to determine which phonemes I had to model.

Phrase: Oooh, that’s a bingo! Is that the way you say it? “That’s a bingo?”

Then, I used Gary C. Martin’s article on american character animator Preston Blair’s phoneme series as a reference for my animation.

Phoneme A,I

Phoneme O

Phoneme U

Phoneme B

Phoneme N,S,Y

Here, I would like to point out that Christoph Waltz has a tendency to show more his teeth in the upper jaw. For this reason, the teeth in the lower jaw are hidden.

The Rest Phonemes

The Problem with Phoneme TH

When I wanted to create the blend shape for the phoneme TH, I realized that the rig we were working with did not have any tongue.

For this reason, I replaced that phoneme with another one to fill in that sound, and hope that this week we can learn how to import a tongue to our rig.

Part 3: Lip-Syncing

Outcome 1

Even though I managed to create several blend shapes, instead of using Preston Blair’s phonemes as reference, I am going to focus more on Christoph Waltz.

I am planning to redo the lip sync animation, focusing specifically on his smile and facial expression.

Lip Syncing – Final Animation

Conclusion

Having reference pictures of the phonemes was an essential tool to create the different blend shapes. However, they can only be considered as a general guide due to the fact that every person has their distinctive way of talking. For this reason, the most challenging thing was to adapt them in order to visually communite Hans Landa’s face expressions.

Reference List

Blair, P. (1994) Cartoon Animation. Walter Foster Publishing: California
Martin, G. C. (1996-2007) Gary C. Martin CG Imagery Development. Available at: http://www.garycmartin.com/phoneme_examples.html (Accessed: 5 December 2022).

Week 9: Body Mechanics Spline

Body Mechanics – Animation Progress

First Outcome

In my first animation, the upper body of my rig is barely animated and for this reason it appears to be extremely stiff.

Second Outcome

In my second animation, the hips are moving much smoother than the first version.

However, the chest of the character still appears to be very stiff and furthermore, the foot is sliding on the floor.

Third Outcome

In my third animation, I can say that the upper body is slowly becoming more flexible than before.

However, I still need to keep working on the rotation of the upper body.

Fourth Outcome

For my fourth attempt, I decided to delete the arms of my rig in order to focus on the animation of the body.

I learned that I first needed to polish the body animation in order to go on with the arms animation.

Fifth Outcome

Finally, I managed to get a smooth animation of the upper body.

In other words, the chest, abdomen and hips are forming a smooth “C” shape while they are rotating.

Now that the body is animated, it is time to start with the arms.

Sixth Outcome

After animating the arms, I realized that the timing was not going so well.

In addition, in some parts it looks as if they are being dragged from side to side, rather than swinging in a more natural way.

Furthermore, I was pointed out to rotate more the feet when they leave the ground.