Category: 3D Animation Fundamentals

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.

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.

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.

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.

Seventh Outcome

Besides from fixing the feet and arm animation, I tried to increase the rotation of the head to achieve an overlapping action.

However, I pushed it too far and now I need to reduce the rotation.

1. Reference Video

What I learned in our lesson was that it is essential to have reference videos from different perspectives.

Despite the fact that I only had limited space to record my reference video, I managed to position several cameras in my room.

However, what I failed to do was to film from a 3/4 perspective, rather than from a front or side view.

2. Key Poses

After shooting my reference video, I sketched the key poses of my animation.

It was actually very useful to have visual references from different perspectives.

In order to create a lip-syncing animation of Christoph Waltz, first I wanted to customize my face rig.

I used some reference pictures (front and side view) of the actor in order to analyze the shape of his face.

The shapes of his face that caught my attention were:

• Plane Face (forehead and chin are aligned).
• Straight & Sloped Forehead
• Cleft Chin
• Wrinkles around his mouth
• Puffy eyes

Even though I am aware that my rig doesn’t entirely resemble the actor, I can say that I used many of his facial features as a reference in order to customize my rig.

In order to start my lip-syncing animation, I had to first import the video and audio into my Maya file.

I used Adobe Premiere Pro to export the video into frames (.jpg sequence) and also the audio (.wav).

After importing the video and audio into my file, for this week we had to animate our character rig like a puppet.

In order words, we needed to analyze the audio waveform in order to determine when our rig was opening and closing its mouth.

Outcome 1 (Blocking)

My first animation did not go as planned because I accidentally animated the master controller of the rig.

For this reason, it looks as it the character is sliding instead of walking.

Outcome 2 (Blocking)

Even though my second attempt looks better than my first one, the feet of my character are still sliding.

I definitely need to keep working on keeping the feet on the ground.

Outcome 3 (Blocking)

For my third animation, I got rid of the stretch and squash deformation in order to focus on the position of the feet.

I can say that I already have the key poses of my character and it is time to change the animation into spline.

Outcome 4 (Spline)

In order to change the animation from blocking into spline, I had to edit the values on the graph editor.

What caught my attention was that the feet were sinking into the ground during the contact positions.

For this reason, I am going to need to fix the foot and toe rotation of my character.

Outcome 5 (Spline)

The walk cycle is finally looking much better.

Nonetheless, I was pointed out that I need to adjust the number of frames during the foot rotation.

To start with, we animated independent blinking eyes.

We also added a frown expression onto the character.

Then, we also modified the eyes, so that our character can squint.

The first part of our assignment was to customize our face rig and change the shape of the face.

I decided I wanted to create my version of an elf and therefore, I looked up for some reference pictures.

I analyzed the key features of those creatures in The Elder Scrolls game and found some similarities on their face construction. The vast majority of the elves have:

• Long faces
• Sunken cheeks
• Pointy ears
• Pointy nose
• Upturn eyes

After analyzing the key features of the elves, I created two blend shapes for my face rig (one for the face and another one for the teeth).

For each part of the face we wanted to modify, we added a new target and therefore I ended up with one for the mouth, ears, nose, cheeks, eyes, chin, eyebrows, skull and teeth.

The first thing we had to do in order to animate the mouth opening and closing was to create joints for the face. I ended up having six joints:

• Base neck
• Mid neck
• Head rotation
• Jaw rotation
• Upper Jaw
• Lower Jaw

Then, we used the paint skin weights tool in order to change the influcence of the movement for the following parts of the face:

• Head
• Neck
• Jaw

I learned that we could increase but also decrease the influence using the brush tool, and so the parts of the face that were painted in white had the most influence.

After reading the chapter on walk cycles, the first thing I had to do was to define the timing of the animation.

Then, I needed to sketch the key poses of my rig:

• Contact Position
• Down Position
• Pass Position
• Up Position

In addition, I had to take into account the minimum and maximum height the walk was going to have.

Furthermore, I also thought about the rotation the rig was going to have during the different positions and also the stretch and squash deformation.

The first thing we did, was to model a box man. We created several cubes and resized them to model the different parts of the body.

In other words, we deconstructed the shapes of a human body into cubes.

Then, we learned about the concept of parenting and how we had to connect each cube in order to create a hierarchical motion structure.

If we take for instance the hand, the movement of the fingers is determined by the movement of the hand and the movement of the hand is determined by the movement of the lower arm.

After creating the hierarchical structure of the box man, we added several joints to the legs.

They would enable our box man to be flexible and allow the movement of the body.

In order to move the box man, we created several master controllers and connected them to the body parts by means of parenting constrains.

Instead of moving the polygons, we would move those master controllers.

The last thing we did, was to create IK Handles for the legs, which allowed our box man to stick its feet on the ground.