blathering bloggerskite

< Click here for the animation >

The point of this assignment was to create model poses (visemes) needed to make Wallace speak, and animate them with blendshapes.

The mouth poses used: three to form the word “happy”, and two others for refinement and a base pose.

A brief animation: here

showing a transition between happy & sad faces below and the neutral expression from Assignment 2:

The goal for this assignment was to create a simple polygonal model of a particular character, using ‘iterative polygonal sculpting techniques’ - which works rather like the subtractive method of carving bits away from the material, refining and smoothing the model in steps to get better and better levels of

In this case, though, it involved more extruding and vertex-pulling than anything else. The entire head was made from a cube, divided into about 20 pieces originally. Faces were extruded to form a rough shape for the mouth, eyebrow ridge, and ears. Then edge loops and occasional polygon divisions were added around the ears and especially the mouth, and the teeth were extruded. Eyes were easiest added separately as two sphere primitives.

The character modeled in this project is Wallace from Wallace & Gromit claymation shorts by Aardman. I thought that the odd shape of his head might make for an interesting model. It certainly isn’t spot-on, but the character does seem to be recognisable, at least.

Reference images:

Three views of the model, depicting actual geometry and smoothed polygons, respectively

The task for this first assignment was to create a (very) simple 3D model with geometric shapes…the purpose being to ‘create a simple 3D face that matches a specific desired look’ of reference materials/sketches rather than make some crazy go-nuts awesome model. (That will come later) Also, it’s necessary to consider how even a simple model would be parameterised to make it changeable/editable to fit a wide range of different faces and characters.

Shapes used: cubes for the head and brows, spheres and sphere ’slices’ for eyes and ears, respectively, a cylinder for the neck, and sliced cones for the nose and lips

< Reference sketches of good ol’ Boxy - The features of the model that would ideally have editable parameters (for quickly making him into a different face altogether) are pretty straightforward, namely:

- the width, tilt, height-placement, and length of ears, brows and lips

- the same options in place for the nose, which at the moment takes extreme prominence…and in this example would likely affect the facial appearance most of all

- the taper, width, or length of the head compared to any implied ‘chin’,

- and spacing between features in relation to each other, esp. between the eyes and surrounding face.

- Neck could technically count, but in this case would seem as more of an emphasis on other features rather than important in its own right

- Most of the ‘emotion’ in this particular model seems best shown through the angle of the face or tilting/rotation of the brows and mouth, especially the latter which is constantly affected by shadows

< Front View
< 3/4 Front View
< Side View

(hm…his expression was meant to look fairly neutral but somehow became a bit worried and addlepated. For something a bit angrier, or at least approaching curmudgeon levels, see below)

< Front View Eyebrow of Disapproval
< “He’d flare Nostrils if he Had ‘Em” 3/4 View
< Side “Slightly Recoiling” View