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).