Project 3 - Dig 2

Project 3

(Digital acting 2)

Project 3:

So for last couple weeks I have been working on another Digital acting project where we were asked to choose between two different project. One was to create a facial animation and lip sync it to a video clip showing my chosen methods of execution, the other one was a full body animation. And since I have already worked on full body animation in my last project i wanted to try out something new so i went for the lip sync!

It took me some time to find the right clip at first i was thinking about using something from the "Simpsons" TV series but i went with the clip from the movie called "Step brothers" instead!

The scene takes place after Will Ferrell and his step brother have finished their family dinner and after being treated badly by Will's real brother they go to the tree house. Soon after Will's brother climbs up the stairs to talk to Will but it only ends up with another argument and "Derrick" (Will's brother) starts taunting them to punch him in the face. "Dale" (Wills step brother) punches Derrick down and he falls from the tree house and that's when my scene takes place.

Planning

I started with looking for a Rig, originally I was going to use the 3DS Max Rig cause it looks humanish and ive also worked with it before. But due to problems i have had in past project I decided to test out a new Rig called DeeRig.

My character didn't have much facial expressions anyways so there wasn't a big requirement when it came to what Rig was right to use. And no matter what Rig i'd use or anyone else you can't go wrong with any Rigs with Will Ferrell's voice behind it!

Like other student I didn't do any planning when it came to animation it self I just went with my gut feeling even thou I was thinking about adding my own twist to the body language.

But since there is hardly any movement on the guy in the clip I didn't do much basically sticked to the clip!

Animation

I was going through a friends old project that he linked me to see how he did it and maybe I could use the same method. What he did was to use the stepped method and then adjust it in graph Editor later to smooth it out, I tried that method but I just didn't like it so I just went and did it my way. 

Basically what I just did, I went in started with the mouth animate the whole clip and then moved in the graph editor tweaked here and there nothing too much. And once i was satisfied I moved on to the eye brows and did pretty much the same there too. If my character wasn't so dam serious in the clip hardly showing any emotion i would have done it a bit differently. I would have done the eye's and the eye lids too but my character doesn't move those at all since hes suppose to be dead serious like in the clip. Otherwise i would have done pretty much the same thing like with rest of the facial parts.

I would have started with the body show the hand movement, shoulders and then head so the character feels more alive. After that i would have started with the facial animation particularly the lips since for some reason i feel like it's easier to animate the eyebrows with the mouth moving. It's almost like the mouth movement anticipates the eyebrow movement and like mentioned in  the advice video posted on Noroff "use a mirror" helped me a lot. I used the mirror to kinda mimic the mouth movements by pronouncing the sentences slowly and then like drawing out circles on a paper based on shapes of my mouth, sounds pretty stupid but it helped me! Smoothing of the animation was mainly done by keyframes even thou I did use the graph editor in some places it just i didn't feel safe enough to fix the frame where the character was moving the mouth a lot.

Evaluation

I really like this project I felt like i got some grasp what it is like to do facial animation but i will have to work on it harder. The Rig I used probably wasn't the best either since i couldn't close the mouth entirely without causing stretching in the mesh it self for some reason. Like mentioned above the real plan was to use Max Rig but I used that one last time and even thou we were suppose to do facials back then i notice that Max Rig didn't have eye brows at all that's why i wanted to use another Rig.

Besides doing lip sync to one of my favorite comedians, it was probably not the best clip to animate to since he basically has one face expression through entire scene. I had to put his right hand up when he was speaking just to make it less boring. The plan was to animation from his upper torso with shoulders and his head moving but it was all about facial animation so i didn't. Thing I could have done better would probably be have some head movement, time the mount better and take another look at the eye brows. Cause at one point their going bananas probably overdid it a bit in the end of the clip! Overall i'm "OK" with this project i know i could have done it a lot better, this is second time i do lip sync and first time i do it alone. 

Video

https://vimeo.com/125898780