So we have finally reached the animation stage of going live! Yay!! We split the characters between us so me and Nely are mostly working on He-Man. These are the shots I'm currently working on. We are going to have a crit session on Monday with the class and another one on Tuesday with Brendan which should help me refine and polish what I've already done.
So the last couple of weeks we have been working on the lip sync. We are like 80% done with it now and most of us have moved on to animation. This is one of the lip sync shots that I was working on.
And here is our previs (now with a new ending!) with our lip sync shots added.
And here is our previs (now with a new ending!) with our lip sync shots added.
So this Friday's lesson was back to the very fundamentals of animation the bouncing ball. We got to really use the graph editor a lot more this class which is good as I have never been that comfortable with it and this lesson has really given me much more of an understanding of how it works and how i can use it to improve my animation. We also made use of the animation layers, something I hadn't used before this course, to add secondary animation on top of what we had done.
In this weeks 3D class we covered lip syncing. I have done a tiny bit of lip synch before but I learned a bunch of methods in this class that will make it much easier and look much better than the way I had previously been doing it. Sang taught us how to first create all the extreme phoneme poses (AI, O, E, U, L, WQ, MBP, FV) and save them as presets to a shelf then use these extreme poses to find the final pose that will be used in the animation. He also taught us that the pose should happen 1 or 2 frames before the sound is made whereas previously I had been putting the pose on the same frame as the sound, Sang's method gives much more realistic results.
This is the final result from the lesson using audio from the matrix (this is just the lip sync no other facial animation).
Maya classes are back! We have started this term with some animation which is great. The first class was looking at a basic walk cycle. This is the final result (if the video is working properly now?):
Learning a bit more about the graph editor was very useful too as I feel like I always neglect it somewhat when I animate. I really enjoyed getting back into animation after not doing much of it last term. This semester will be fairly animation heavy which is good. I'm going to try and do some 11 second clubs alongside Going Live and developing my final project if I have time.
