This week in class I learnt a LOT about facial animation. Alec put up files to download which included a rain rig with preloaded assets of face animations, an audio clip from Parks and Recreation and slides that had reference mouth shapes.
I watched the tutorial on how to add the audio file in, I forget sometimes how much of blender I still don’t know. With only the assets that were pre-oaded I got to work. I couldn’t get the w mouth shape to work so I had to improvise a little bit with the mouth shape and when rendering I had no idea how to render the animation with the sound attached.
After a practice round I took some time to hunt for a bit of audio to use next.
I absolutely love parks and recreation so it was kind of a no brainer to go with one of my favourite lines that Ben says and it also gives me room to add a prop later on. I knew before I started that I wanted to have a few more assets in my library for the rig to use
I used this video to figure out how to add more assets
I added L, a better T and S and tried adding a better W but I had some trouble actually applying some of the assets I created.
I think its going good so far, there’s defiantly a few points where I need to sharpen the mouth movements and get a clearer visual but I had Aodhan look over it and he said it was quite good. I look forward to learning more about facial movements and getting the body involved. I would love to make it dramatic and sassy by the end.
I started making the rest of the facial animations, using extra guides I found online to help with facial movement
I like how it’s going but I knew it needed a lot of work so I sent it to my friends via Discord and they said to change the eyes and some of the eyebrow movements to make it flow better.
I made my own reference video but am not great at acting however I did like the end part where it got angrier which I wanted to incorporate into my own animation.
I went to tiktok to find reference videos because people will post anything and I was really happy with what I found, I found a girl who had really good facial expressions and head movements for the start of the audio which I used a lot to make my own one but I wasn’t a fan of the end
for the last part, I looked more at this one for inspiration
I was really happy with the way it was going the head movement looked better but I still have to animate the eyes better and also the eyebrows need to be fixed
I wanted the camera movement to represent the sitcom that I chose, I love parks and rec and they love fast camera movements so I made sure to incorporate that in my animation
I still wasn’t finished, I needed props. Originally I wanted to add a computer with my walk cycles which I did make on the screen but after reconsidering and thinking about holding a laptop would be a bit too in the way I decided to pull inspiration from the scene in which I got the audio from.
I made a really bad version of the Rain rig and gave it an armature which I had plans for but eventually fell through because it was too small and distracting to animate. I took that into my blender file and tried adding a dynamic parent to the wrist armature but it would not work,
I texted the class discord channel but didn’t get a reply, I didn’t want to animate the doll separately so I kept trying until eventually the dynamic parent worked but only with the doll being the parent so I went with that and animated the arm using the doll instead of the wrist rig. I figure it won’t make a difference visually so I’d say that problem was solved pretty well.
I wanted to change the camera angles to focus more on the doll now and also get the eyes looking into the camera, breaking the fourth wall.
To wrap things up, I added a background that was a wall with photographs and added more movement in the head throughout the animation so that she didn’t look so stiff. By the end there was a section where she sat still which I thought would be good for dramatic effect but it didn’t look great so I added more movement from the eyes and head, I added as much secondary motion as I could without it being too dramatic and Im really happy with how it worked out