For the Final Challenge of the term, I had to plan and create lip-sync and performance animation using the ‘Eleven’ rig. During this process, I found relevant, performative audio from the 11 Second Club, and recorded relevant reference footage of myself adding exemplification of personality.
Planning and Prep
Kenny Roy’s ‘How to cheat in Maya’ was a key reference for me during this process, and suggested that the first step to the lip-sync and performance process is to listen to the audio over and over, finding the accents and nuances and creating a performance in your mind before recording (2014: 248). To prepare for this I noted the key pauses and tonality changes in the piece of dialogue I had chosen. After recording the reference footage, I imported it into sync sketch and made a visual note of all of the keyframes of eyebrows and influenced cheek movement to help better understand the nuances of the face.
When starting this step I added accentuation on each nuance of phrase by using one finger to pronounce the word first, pausing motion on the word moment to visually underscore he is savouring the moment, and adding a softer motion at the end to compliment the ‘flowy-ness’ of the word ‘experience’.
Blocking the Animation (Facial)
The initial building blocks I used to start the animation were getting the key jaw bounce and viseme poses to create a believable looking lip sync. The tongue was the next step of Roy’s process I followed, ensuring that the tongue was in believable enough positions at key moments of dialogue to sell the speech as much as I could (2014). The next step required the addition of eyebrow motions and eye darts. Referring back to Roy, I created the eye dart movements across two frames at a time to create the most naturalistic look to them. Baring in mind the rigging and skin weighting of the rig, I also tried to exaggerate the eyebrows as much as I could without causing the polygons of the eyelids to crash to an unfixable state.
Performance Animation Blocking
Following on from the completion of the facial animation, I took keyframes from my video performance and tried to replicate the general feel and timing to express the ideas I conveyed in my own performance. When doing the performance of this step I wanted to try and push my level of understanding of body movement and make reference to my video footage, using the body movements to help accentuate each of the words. While my initial blocking poses lacked in conveyance, I feel during the cleaning process I added more exaggerated stress on each action.
Video of Process
Post Editing
Going into after effects and adding additional motion blur, once again adds a sense of realism that Maya cannot time effectively replicate. During this process, I think the piece started to come together, however reflectively in order to improve the piece I would focus more on the detail and follow-through of the fingers. Also, the strength and weight of the key poses when blocking out initially, as I had to change a lot in the general cleaning process to convey the emotion I wanted to. I also think that getting the nuances of facial expression could have been pushed a bit more than I have done.
Final Product
Problem Solving Methods
During the process of this animation, I had issues where the head seemed to disconnect itself from the rest of the rig. In this case, I had already produced a lot of the animation and did not have enough time to look into the issues surrounding the rig. Thinking of solutions, I looked into methods of exporting keyframes from one rig and placing them onto a fresh version of the rig.
By selecting all of the Facial controllers, and exporting the selected as an ANIM file, I was able to recover all the work I had done of the broken rig and apply it to the new one in order to add the body performance animation.
Final Result
Bibliography
Roy, K., 2014. How to cheat in Maya 2014. Abingdon: Focal Press.