Lip syncing

So something went awfully wrong with my new model, creating blend shapes before you bind the skin does not work it turns out...well it didn't for me anyway. Note to self I need to really research into something before trying it out, but I guess in a way, making mistakes is how you learn. I ended up trying to rig the face of my character and created quite a few controls to do this. It seemed to be working fine and I was quite pleased with how it was going, however the problem that arose was when I was trying to weight paint the rest of the body. When I rotated the head I couldn't get the influence right and so the geometry became quite distorted. This may have been caused by the extra joints and weight painting I did on the face but I'm not sure. Either way I will look into this further when I return to uni as this is something I will want to do at some point in the year.


Anyway after that disaster I decided to try out some lip syncing as this was the direction I wanted to head down with my model if it had worked out. I used a pre-made rig, the Eleven Rig. I used this within my PPP presentation so I knew the controls and didn't have to learn a whole new rig all over again. I got a piece of dialogue, in this case a scene from Finding Nemo and acted it out whilst recording myself. This would give me a basis to work off and the timings I could animate to. Reference is always a key thing so I need to get into the habit of recording myself acting out the scene whenever I can for future animations. This isn't the whole audio clip I have just been working through a little bit at a time. For my first try it's okay but there still is a lot more work that can be done to improve it. The animation curves within the graph editor I know I need to develop a better understanding of, this will improve my animation making it more realistic and believable.

Starting Again

So I decided to completely start again with my character as I felt I had made too many mistakes and now I knew what I was doing wrong; I would be able to create a new character with a cleaner mesh and have a better idea of what to do.

As you can see I have progressed a lot further and have got to the stage where I need to begin weight painting. I decided to keep the textures quite simple as I wanted to be able to complete a fully working character. I have looked into blend shapes myself and began trying out some to see what would happen, the video below shows some I created. Blend shapes are an easier way to create expressions of alter different parts of the body without having to rig it. Obviously you won't have the same amount of control over it as a rig however this seemed much simpler for me to achieve as I'm not sure how to go about rigging a whole face. Since then I have created a few more expressions and also have created controls so you are able to move the eyes around.

I'm still really learning things as I go so nothing really is going to be perfect, but I hope by doing this, when it comes to my second year at uni I will be able to create something to a higher standard and understand the process behind it better.