For this next assignment, we were tasked with focusing on weight, character and performance. We had to do this through two tasks – by creating a weight lift animation and a lipsync animation.

Due to my last submission being entirely 2D, for this assignment I wanted to challenge myself and make both of these tasks using the Rain rig in Blender.

Weight lift

For this part of the assignment, I decided that I wanted the Rain character to try – and fail – at pulling a sword from a stone. My only problem for this was it was quite hard to find a good reference for the action I was going for, I learned from the Walk Cycles assignment that having a strong reference is very important, and not heavily using one was one of my downfalls last time. I decided to attempt to make my own but my body was too stiff and I couldn’t make the movements look natural. So I tried to find anything that would match my idea and the closest thing I found was rope pulling videos.

I found this animation made by Timothy Bailey which perfectly matched what I was going for. The exaggerated pulls of the male character was a style I wanted to emulate.

I also found some real life references, so I could study and understand how the weight of the body shifts with the foot position. From this is saw that, when pulling hard, the body retains tension in the knees and the back and shoulders lock in place.

Timing is key for both of these tasks, and timing was something I struggled with last assignment so I blocked out all my key poses every five frames in Constant interpolation mode so I could easily adjust the timing between the key frames before working on the inbetweens. 

In blocking out, I had to learn how to use the FK/IK switch which, at first, I thought was easy enough. But as I started to move the frames into the correct timing, I noticed that the IK switch cannot be moved in the action editor and must be adjusted manually. This was a bit of a pain as, every time I fixed the timing, the IK was messed up. But it wasn’t that big of a problem, just a little tedious.

My favourite part of this process was playing around with facial expressions. I went with a very exaggerated style, pushed the rig – especially the jaw and the eyebrows – to get the look of annoyance and frustration across. I sat with a mirror on my desk so I could make the expressions myself to see how they flow into each other.

My main struggle with this was the fall at the end as I didn’t really have that good of a reference. I mainly used this animation by SageOfMagic to get the poses down and I think my saving grace was the fast timing as I always seem to get my timing too fast.

Looking back now, I realise that I should’ve had more poses before I moved onto polishing as it would’ve made the final animation process a lot smoother. Even now, watching the final render back, I can see very obviously that some parts are jerky and don’t flow well. One thing I am proud of though, is the hair animation. When working on the walk cycles last assignment, I found that I couldn’t get the hair movements to look natural, but I definitely feel like I am starting to crack it.

Despite this, I am quite happy with the final outcome. I feel like this has definitely an improvement from my attempts at the Walk Cycles in Blender. If I could go back and start over with the knowledge I have now, I would want to be a bit more experimental with my animation, work on the fall at the end and polish it up a little more.

 

Lip Sync

The next task was to chose an audio and create a, eight to ten second lip sync animation.

The hardest part of this was getting started. I struggled to find an audio to animate, unsure of whether I wanted to something serious or something funny, but eventually I landed on a clip from the TV show Arcane as it’s my favourite show at the minute.

The setup for my scene was a game of Connect4 that the Rain character has lost, meaning she has to enact the end of a deal she thinks is stupid. I liked this idea a lot, as I felt I could play around with exaggeration in movements and expressions. I created a Connect4 grid and some counters quickly in Blender, and I used a chair model that we had been given for a previous task in class. I wanted the setup to be pretty basic as the main focus would be on the lip sync. Having the character sitting down also meant that I wouldn’t have to animate the lower body which I was thankful for, since I haven’t quite cracked animating feet yet.

Again, I needed a strong reference for this but I obviously couldn’t find any I needed from the internet, and I didn’t want to copy straight from the original video, so I had to film my own reference. I played around for with a lot of different styles and setups, different movements but eventually I found the action I wanted and, after many (embarrassing) takes, I whittled it down to two ones I liked the most.

 

I like the first part of the first one, particularly the “Alright, alright” head swivel, and in the second one I like the facial expressions and the slam of the fist, so I Frankenstein-ed it and the next video together to create the perfect take I wanted and used this to start animating.

So onto animating. I, again, started with blocking out all the key poses every five frames. I focused mainly on the movements of the body in this section as I wanted it to be very exaggerated and lively. My main goal was to have everything move in arcs to get this dramatic movement – especially in the head swivel and the hand swipe.

Then, I moved on to timing. And I’ve found that I really enjoy this part of the process as watching the animation come together made me feel really proud of the progress I was making. However, similar to the weight lift, the IK switch was a tedious thing to adjust and solve. But unlike the weight lift, I feel like the switch between IK and FK is less jerky and obvious in the final render. 

Another thing I learned from the weight lift is that I need more inbetweens before moving on to polishing. I was quite nervous to try matching up the lip sync so, along with the mirror in front of me, I looked up a lip sync chart to help get the key mouth poses. I found two online, one 2D to get the basic shapes and one 3D as I felt it was good to have a reference that fit the medium I was using. So for this next step I focused on adding the facial expressions and mouth movements

Overall, I believe adding more inbetweens was the right thing to do, because I was very proud of my block out in the end. Especially the lip sync line up and the expressions.

 

 

 

 

But when one problem was solved, another came. I found that, as I was adjusting the timing, the audio would glitch and change timing. When I originally set up the scene, the audio ran until frame 240 but as I was adjusting the key poses to match up with the words, it kept changing. I am unsure if I had missed a step or accidentality made a mistake or if this is just a me problem, but I couldn’t find a way to fix it so I just had to keep adjusting the frames every so often until I had finished completely. This was, obviously, very very annoying and time consuming but I think I’ve got it down well enough for the final animation.

In the end, I couldn’t figure out how to render both the audio and the animation together, so I had to add the audio then separately in an editing software at the end. Because of this, I feel the timing is a little off on the lip sync. I also feel that, while I am proud with my lip sync, I could have visualised annunciation more. Especially in the line “well, I still think” as, to me, it looks like the mouth barely moves and the movements just blur together and does not align with the audio.

 

 

At the end of this Assignment, and this module in general, I feel a lot more confident in my 3D abilities. I’m glad I chose to do this assignment in 3D, as I feel I didn’t give Blender a fair shot for the walk cycles, feeling intimidated by the complicated and time consuming steps. But I can surely say that I really enjoyed working in Blender for both the lip sync and the weight lift. Especially during the block out parts of both projects, which was probably my favourite part of both. I also feel like I enjoyed working in 3D a lot more than working in 2D this module, which is something I never would have said at the start of the year.

Of course, my work is not perfect and I can still see so many imperfections in the final product. Time was my greatest enemy for this assignment, entirely a fault of my own due to prioritising another assignment due before this one. If I had more time, I would have definitely liked to be more experimental and adventurous with both my projects – things like adding sound to my weight lift and working out the audio glitch in my lip sync – but I am proud of the progress I’ve made in the short time between this assignment and the walk cycle assignment last year, and I look forward to what the next modules have in store.