Full motion complete

I'm down to the last week now before hand in, except for the eyebrow movement, all of the motion in my character has been worked in. I'm now onto the cleanup pass and working in a bit of eyebrow movement (which is relatively simple).

There are a few things to tweak, after a meeting with my project supervisor and secondary reader I've got a few things to consider, the main thing is adding in a shine to the eyes which I can do with a lense over the iris and tweaking the specular to get a nice highlight and tweaking the iris shader to define them more on some frames. The shader levels might need tweaking on other things as well.

Now I'm getting onto finnishing the dissertation and I want to get it done hopefully mid-week so I can get it checked and bound for the hand-in on monday, I'll also be tweaking bits of the animation as well.

Here's what my animation is looking like at the moment:

It's occured to be that the rimlight on the jaw is going a bit wierd, that needs fixing

For the past week my focus has been on animating the shoulders upwards, she's starting to look more alive now and it's looking a lot better than the constant stare, she's got a looker now for the eye movement and while I was doing that I gave her a new haircut and a hat. A freind of mine on games art offered to texture the hat and did a nice looking leopard skin print, though unfortunately in the end it hasn't been used since a pattern/textured hat dosen't quite work with the rest of the character.

I found one problem with the rig that isn't exactly a major issue but it's something to keep in mind, the 'key all' button on the biped guide causes the mouth bone to break and is no longer driven by the GUI controll I set up for it, apart from that everything seems to be working.

I now have 12 seconds of body animation and by next week I hope to extend that all the way to the end of the animation (an additional 41 seconds), though with a presentation for another module on monday as well as other work that needs doing the work will have to be delayed until monday afternoon, though I may see if I have time over the weekend to squeeze some animation in.

On top of the body animation I've now added a visulization taken from iTunes which is synced up to the track I'm animating to to add something a bit more interesting behind her, and I've added hair simulation for some secondary motion.

Animation and concerning the finishing touches

I've been working on the lip sync pass since last week and it's finished to a decent degree, now I'm starting to add animation into the eyes. I've started on blinking and I'm going to set up a looker (which is nice and simple to do). 

There's a few thing I'm going to be keeping in mind while I animate the other passes of the character, breathing cropped up on the lip sync pass, but just didn't look right. When it comes to animating the body of the character I will approach the issue again and see how well it works when combined with the body motion of breathing. The final animation camera will be locked onto the head and shoulders of the character to keep it more personal and allow me to spend more time on less animation, but to a higher quality.

While the camera will be panning round the character she will be looking at it, perhaps more nervously, the section of the song that I am using it rather delicate and lends itself more to this and makes is a bit more personal with the character.

The hair is still an issue, it's not really styled in any way and was made quickly in comparison with the rest of the model, there is a photo of imogen heap from when she was in 'Frou Frou' that I'll be looking at for reference, so she'll have a trilby and choppy hair covering her ear (even though she doesn't actually have any).

The final consideration is the finishing touches to the background, at the moment I have two ideas for this, one being particles emitting light and fading out away from a source. The other is taking a visualization of the waveform of the music from a music player and applying it to the background at an animated image so that it would match up with the song as it's being sung.

As it stands here is my current progress with the project, though the lip sync could use improvement (and more mouth shapes if there is time).

Moving onto animation

I've now put a halt on the modelling rigging and enveloping to get on with animation, with about a month to go and about 2 weeks till expo tees I need to start creating some animation. The facial rig will be updated as I go on, but for the moment it is being kept simple for speed of creating the animation.

In addition to an open/closed/wide/narrow controll I've added in a corrective/smile shape to add a little bit more depth to the animation with relative ease.

She is still looking a bit wooden, but I will be building up the level of facial controll as long as I have enough time, I also need to create a looker for the eyes which is relatively simple. I've started on the first pass for the facial animation. I am approaching the animation in this order.

1. Base open/closed/wide/narrow mouth shape pass
2. Refine the base pass
3. Add in the smile/corrective shape
4. Add in eye and eyebrow movement
5. Add head and body movement

After getting approximately 30-40 seconds of animation I will add more or go back and refine the animation with aditional controls if time is available. So far I have 11 seconds of the base mouth pass. At the moment She is looking rather wooden, hopefully eye movement should improve this, but adding more face controls (time allowing) would be the most effective method.

I will be working on the report as I move on with animation, but for the moment the priority lies in the animation.

Face rigs and shading

I have been working on the facial rig of my character as well as tweaking the rig for the main body, some of the character has also been re-scaled by adjusting the rig as well.

Currently the facial rig has been set up with a wide and narrow mouth shape, these could probably use some tweaking, but this could be remedied once the mouth open/close has been stored out. I'm using a bone to control the jaw, this is also controlling the lower teeth and tongue and makes it a bit easier to make the shapes of the face. I'm going to set up constraints on the jaw and set it to drive the 'Open' mouth shape which needs fixing as you can see the corners of the mouth are looking rather strange when the mouth opens. There also needs to be some more control for the mouth sides and the unique mouth shapes like 'oo', 'b,m,p', 'f', etc.

The eyebrows are set up for 'scruntch', up and down and the eyes are able to blink. I'm going be adding a 'more open' shape for the eyes as well as setting up more movement in the muscles under the eyes.

Admittedly some of this detail might not be as necessary as I've now taken a toon shading route, I've been playing around with the shader settings and this is the first version I've come up with, the colours are currently a bit bright and some of the blurriness could be adjusted, but the 'rim light' actually gives quite a nice effect and really pulls her out from the background.

At the moment it is a more unnatural light compared to the examples above, but due to the nature of toonshading the 3 point lighting I've used previously doesn't quite work initially, so I'll have to work on that

The most urgent problem is getting the character ready for animation, I am taking part in expo tees, so that gives me less than a month to produce a descent bit of animation, as for the final hand in date, it's a little bit over 5 weeks away, so I'll have to start working on the dissertation as well.

Character clothed, haired and considerations on style

I'm finalizing the character now, I need to get onto the rigging stage so I can start animating. One consideration is the style, my Project Supervisor expressed concern over the soft nature of the current character vs. the more angular features of Imogen Heap and the synthetic nature of the track.

The current progress of the character is looking like this:

The main focus now is getting her moving, I can get on with rigging her, but the problem is how the envelope and facial rig will be affected by any changes to the geometry if it needs changing. To attempt to combat those issues I will need to have multiple versions of the character. For the moment she will be staying like this, I can UV map the model later if needs be. I could use mudbox to change the style of the character or keep her at a lower (or no) sub-division level. I'll probably have a few versions of the character, or 2 or more sets of shapes to use with the shape manager, depending on the subdivision level.

Granted this is a rather crude approach (simply not sub-dividing the model). Another option is editing it in post, I'll have to look into that later, but for now I need to get her moving.

Dissertation (again) and another change to the project

A short update even though there hasn't been one for about a month, my dissertation is now over 6,000 words but there hasn't been any progress on the actual model, rigging or animation

After looking into reference for Imogen Heap I found the video for her song 'Hide and Seek', after a meeting with my project supervisor and discussing the video I will now be focusing on the character alone and getting rid of the environment and the short bit of narrative that surrounded the performance. I will also be considering the lighting and style of the video, I may choose to light it in grey scale with a Lambert shader or simple black and white toon shading. While this is something to consider the main agenda is to get the model ready for animation.

Note: the format of the video is actually in portrait