Critical analysis of finished piece “evaluation”

I had never animated this closely to a video reference. This approach definitely has its advantages and drawbacks. For example because of the visual reference always being there for me I found it very easy to keep myself on the track. But the main pitfall in this case (that I've encountered) is losing the original performance due to deviances from the reference material. Since Jim Carrey is a very animated character himself I could get away without performing on my own. The scene I chose wasn't a typical all-over-the-place kind of Jim's scene for the main acting was done by the eyes and brows.

When I started animating I was told my animation was too floaty. Then I started to use Plateau tangents to achieve sharper moves and have the character be seemingly still for a while. I believe this is the the same pitfall because in a lot of cases people who gave me feedback didn't watch the reference video beforehand. So I am sure my animation lacks moving holds.

Due to the limited number of blendshapes that I created for my character I believe I have managed to achieve a credible lipsync. Since there is a thin line between credibility and realism I tried to hold myself back from creating realistic Jim's rubbery facial expressions. It is supposed to be a cartoon after all.

I believe I've managed to transfer at least some of Ace's characteristics and behaviours portrayed in the reference video. Spending more time on it would surely bring out more character.

The finished piece is rather detailed textures-wise but the lighting is not well thought out, hence, the character doesn't blend in with the background all that well. Because of the high resolution it was rendered in (1080 HD), when scaled down, it looks very sharp and nice.

Brief technical summary of scene and process

For the first time I had my character made out of separate objects (head, arms, tank-top and shirt). This helped a lot with hiding UV seams and saving time on UV mapping and texturing (copied the finished arm to the other side).
I kept my rig very simple and did only FK controls at the beginning but then, as the animation progressed I added IK handles and pole vectors. I never got rid of my blendshapes and it was a good decision for I had to come back and do some tweaking for a better result. When animating, I used plateau tangents to avoid unnecessary overshoots.
Also instead of keying manually I had auto-key on for the most of the time. My scene consists of the character, four lights (three spot and one directional) and a backplane. I rendered the character separately and to save on render time did just one render of the back plate and matched its movement in post. Also I didn’t use motion blur while rendering but added it later. I also created a quick extra scene for the floor shot. I mapped the photos and the newspaper texture on a couple of poly planes. A finalizing touch was added using Photoshop.

Done!

The time has come to end this project.
The journey has been long but well worth the effort.
While working on this project I've learned better ways of UV mapping and texturing (including my first steps in Mudbox), more efficient ways of modelling and gained deeper understanding on how to work efficiently with the Graph Editor.

Instead of straight ahead action approach I also tried out pose-to-pose which in this case, I think, wasnt all that well applicable... but nevertheless I will use it for my Final Year Project.
I also properly understood the impact of moving holds and paid a lot more attention to arcs (motion trails proved useful).

All in all - a couple more lessons learned and now I'm ready to apply my new knowledge to the FYP.

The long workdays and worknights spent in FY labs will always be remembered with a smile.

Crappy Mac Crap Crap

Right.

After the D4I presentation I thought I'd have plenty of time to animate the rest of Ace. The truth is that I don't.

I could've worked all evening yesterday and all day today if there wasn't the licence server problem at the Uni.

I kinda have set up my laptop to help me out in this situation but it is way too slow and my other display is quite.... bad.

Yet another proof that bad things decide to strike when they can have the greatest impact :D

I guess its good to always keep this in mind. It is hard but I'll try.

Getting there!

A thought:

"Your animation can only be as good as your rig."
Meaning that having a good rig pays off very much!

Right now I am doing the lipsyncing and I'm halfway through with it.

The plan is to finish this stage as soon as possible. Then move on to eyes and brows.
And then, if time permits, go through the body animation, refine it as well as add secondary animation such as hair movement etc.
Not much time left but things are going relatively smoothly.

So far so good.

Animation Process

Two weeks ago I bought this wonderful book suggested by everybody. Indeed it contains some fantastic information on how to ease our lives in Maya.

At this point I had my Ace animation blocked out. Feedback stated that at most places it was too floaty and lacked sharp movements.

So with new blocking techniques under my belt I tried to do it again.

It was the stepped tangent approach where all of the key poses are created in a row and then spaced out to match the timing. It turned out well but I realized that I had already spent a reasonable amount of time on the previous version and that fixing it would be more efficient than continuing the new one.

And so I did.

Now I feel that the body animation is nearly finished. I added more arcs for the head, more variations here and there.

There are still some things I'll have to tweak but now I shall move on to lip-syncing.

In my case most of the acting in the reference video is done by the eyes and brow area.. bring on the challenge! :)

Long time, no Ace...

Hello everybody!

Just got back to working on mister Ace here.. He's been left alone for too long.

Started creating a couple of blendshapes, hooked them up and checked them out.
As always the deformation order was wrong so I had to go to The All Inputs menu. For my surprise Maya gave me an error that looked like this:
// Error: Object 'row1' not found. //

Now at this point I was totally scared :D
I went around internet looking for an answer.

Nothing seemed working until I found this amazing MEL command that saved my day.

reorderDeformers "skinCluster1" "blendShape1" "meshName";

replace these with whatever your mesh is affected by. (you can see the list of inputs under the 'inputs' tab in the channel editor).

Apparently this is something specific to Maya 2011 and the bugs that are being fixed.

Glados lipsync

So, first off... This is a very old head model that I finally decided to finish. I started making it with a lipsync idea in my mind. I wanted to animate a quote that I really like.

[btw, ignore that video - it doesn't matter.]

I was also looking for a new way to rig a face. Blendshapes seemed like something that I've played with enough, joint setups seemed somewhat too hardcore. I was even looking for something that would rig the face automatically. But I found something more interesting.

It is Kickstand's Stretchmesh. [The video's about Kickstand's Facelift, which is based on Stretchmesh, so you'll get the idea.]

Here's the official website.

They have a very basic explanation of how to use Stretchmesh so I had to figure out the rest. It was fun and I understood the benefits and drawbacks of this technique.

It is very intuitive and easily tweakable but in some cases other means are more appropriate to achieve the desired result.

So here's a little test video.

Reflection No_1

Alright, it is week 3 already and this is my first blog post on how things are going with mister Ace Ventura. If you've missed out on how things have been evolving during the first two weeks, look here.

This week I've done most of the texturing work.

Next thing I need to do is to finish the texture for hands, add some bump to the hair and eyebrows. Then I'll be able to move on to rigging which will be a LOT of fun. Can't wait to do the blendshapes!

And...

To be honest, I must admit its a bit bizarre how rapidly this project is evolving this time.

Its not like I mind :D

Oh yeah, Yesterday I did a storyboard and animatic as well.