Feasability Testing 3: Facial Performance

Been thinking about the facial setup and animation a lot for this project, I wanted to go a step further from the 2nd yr group project and try something different. I spent a lot of time looking at Jason Osipa in the 2nd year maya option and rigged and animated accordingly which is something i'd like to go back to with the mouth and make sure i create all of the correct extreme shapes to link up into neater sliders later on rather than lists of blendshapes.

The approch to animating it and thinking in layers also helped lots and can be seen in the test below (2nd yr maya unit) trying not to do everything at once, thinking about the widest/up and down points, then accents in the head, eye darts etc and slowly build up the performance rather than try and do everything at once.


Facial Anim Tests from Stacie Hawdon on Vimeo.


The biggest difference this time round is the eyes, I wanted to test myself and do something other than semi realistic looking eyes and have more fun with the shapes - e.g Eve's eyes in wall-e and the button eyes in Coraline, simple shapes relying a lot on the brow to convey the emotion etc...

In terms of testing the faces range of movement im going to create a simple set of mouth/eye/brow shapes to work back into later on, looking at a broad range of "lip sync shapes" including Aardman, Preston Blair, Eve, and in a mirror to try and sculpt the best possible ones, I've found it easier to work straight into maya rather than draw everything out then translate to 3d, will post tests shortly