blathering bloggerskite

“Revise your model as needed to create an improved animation (as a .mov file) of your face acting out your dialog. This should be very close to the final version, with final lighting, surfacing and camera motion as well as refined expression and speech animation. “

Final is listed below. There’s still something wrong with the eyes…namely, I have somehow turned off the shinyness and still can’t find where to fix it. Otherwise, I’m pretty happy with the result.

Click here for .mov

“Revise your model as needed to create an improved animation (as a .mov file) of your face acting out your dialog. In this version begin to focus on lighting and surfacing as well as expression animation.”

A prettyish picture from the eventual render…with unintentional 5 o’clock shadow X( :

And a next-to finished version of the animation, sans surfacing.
Click here for .mov

“Using the refined, rigged version of your model create the initial animation (as a .mov file) of your face acting out your dialog.”

Finally….getting blendshapes to do what I want them to do, and putting some decent skin texture on there. Obviously this is not close to the final version, particularly since the hair needs shading of some sort, and none of the sound is synched. This is what happens when you realise your computer does not have working sound, so you make your rough animation based on the shape of the waveform….

Click here for .mov

Here are some of the first passes of blend shapes (made by rigging a face with clusters, pulling these, and refining the result before making it into a target shape):

…And some more expressions and visemes (slightly terrifying, here)…

What I do have at the moment is continued issues with combining blendshapes and joint rotations…which work okay separately, but together make parts of the model explode. Argh.

animation of neck twist

some of the blend shapes

The eyes, and especially the nose and mouth are more refined this time around…nostrils have magically appeared and the geometry around the lips is a vast improvement. Ears are still a figment of wildest fantasy and the hair, at this point, looks more like a turban…so there’s plenty still to do.

Refined nose and mouth:

Helmet-head in progress (+ earcup):