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.