Working towards my plan of learning character animation, have animated my first lipsync animation. Am quiet happy with it, but i still need to know what you guys think. Took me like five nights to animate.
Quite an unusual post. Anyway have decided to give it out since i can’t really consume all my bandwidth alone. ENJOY!
LOGIN: zpixel
PASS: freeforall
I know it’s to early to abandon the blog. i’ve just been busy with stuffs related to the current project. I will post about it later.
If you’ve seen or noticed my stuffs, i don’t do anything that involves character animation. Ok, ask me why. WHY! because am scared of doing whack animation, i’ve seen too many wonderful animations by professionals and i’ve heard them blab about how many 100years they’ve been animating for and that they are still learning blah blah… But i later realised its not possible to walk without having crawled before (only superman can). so what am trying to say is i don’t mind how whack it looks at first i will keep moving until God knows when. I’ve decided to spend the rest of this year concentrating on animation and hoping i will be posting my whackest animation where for you to see. The best place for me is to take part in animation challenges like 11 seconds . No! i don’t have plans to win (for now atleast).
Just thought i should post some test renders from the current project am working on. The interior was rendered in vray for maya while exteriors were done in mental ray .
After some sss tests, i finally came up with some descent black skin shader using mentalray fast_skin shader in maya which i plan to reuse for the remaining characters.To my surprise, the rendering was quiet fast.
About the hair, am still undecided how to go about it, maybe mapping hair texture on geometry or using the hair system in maya. i will try both out and post my results later.
I don’t know if you’ve noticed the increase in high quality game cinematics in the past couple of years, most of the very nice ones come from Blur Studio
I recently took my time to watch all the game cinematics they’ve worked on. like warhammer, tombraider, hellgate and so many more, this guys are just amazing. This is the kind of medium i will like to tell stories with.
i found a link to the making of warhammer online organised by gnomon Gnomon School of Visual Effects | “The Making of” Event: Blur Studio, The Making of Warhammer Online: Age of Reckoning Trailer. Wonderful source of inspiration.
This project has opened my blind eyes to computer graphics in a way. Never you under estimate anything in 3d nothing is easy to do.
When we started developing the story for this project we forgot how much little experience we had, we were thinking so big that we actually forgot how small we were. Right now, there are so many characters, sets props and animation to be done now the project is taking forever to finish just because we underestimated the whole thing. I hope you get to learn from this little/big mistake.
Have always not been a fan of blendshapes for facial rigging it doesn’t allow for flexiblity. After so many research on how best to do facial rigs, we have finally settled for a joint based rig which am very impressed with. For those that don’t know how it works, You place joints around the face, in places where we have major facial muscles like around the eyes, mouth, smile-line, chin…Basically places you need to move around to achieve whatever expression you need. Although, there are other method based on the same concept like using curves instead of joints.
Advantages of joint based facial rig over blendshapes:
neutral
smile
To finish up the rig, link the GUI sliders to the joints via cotrollers connected to the joints using Set Driven Key. Incase you need any clarification leave a comment.
I planned on doing 3d animatics in addition to the existing storyboard. This will help nail stuffs like camera angle/moves, timing for every scene…
i just finished making a proxy rig by editing one of our existing rigs, replacing the mesh with primitives. I will block out the all scenes on friday for the animatics. Thursdays are my off-days . lol
proxy_rig
