Eye dart is the fast moving micro-changes of eye direction. Characters eyes are the element where the attention is most directed to. Eyes are very expressive and are key for communicating thoughts and feeling.
changes of eye direction are usually accompanied by blinking.

animate the brows: eyes and eyebrows should be animated together such as it happens on a blink when the eyes and eyebrows tend to close and open together (which is something that was useful in my performance animation: after I animated the brows I animated the eyes up and down according to their movement)

eye direction can help maintain the connection between characters or a character with an object: making sure a character is looking at the object his or her speech is aimed at may help to improve the overall intention of an action.

Eye darts:

eyes often dart from side to side moving around rapidly as they do if one think or talking. Eyes dart in animation happen fast so maximum three frames and they are used so to not make eyes look dead and keep them alive, however they should not move too much otherwise they would appear detached from the body action.

”eyes are the window to the soul”

in some animation the eyes have to carry all the expression as it happens in the phone character in toy story 3 where the eyes and eyebrows are the only mean to unrestricted the characters expressions and they are enough.

eye lids can carry a great amount of expression in the eyes: wide eyes can give a blank look. In the film “Robots” they had a problem on how to design the eyes of the robots characters. So to create an appealing eye expression they decided to use the down eyelids.

when changing the eye direction is recommended to use an eye link as a transition otherwise it would result in a odd animation because we always blink in real life.

there are different types of blink:

a light blink, a heavy blink or a half blink. And when animating the eyes lids the eyebrows should move as well in unison. Slow blinking can show the character thinking compared to a fast blinking. The eyelid carries the moment of the pupil usually. An offset eye blink for the eyes can add texture to the animation.

Williams, A., 2021. How to Animate Eye Darts. [online] Animationapprentice.blogspot.com. Available at: <http://animationapprentice.blogspot.com/2019/07/how-to-animate-eye-darts.html> [Accessed 13 December 2021].

Performance animation & Pre-Viz

Performance Part 3: 

Preparation: Character Set & Body Blocking (Storytelling Poses)

I have created a character set for the body keys to create the animation. After I decided that I was going to use an FK arms rig since they are only moving on a table. I set the animation settings to stepped keyframes, I brought the reference footage I have recorded in the scene to use as a guide while animating and created a geometry for the table where the hands are leaning onto.

Just like I did for the body mechanics I tried to match the character rig which myself in the footage even though it was not possible to match them perfectly since the proportion are different. I then saw the major changes for storytelling in the footage and created the first keyframes: I focused my attention on the head and hands movement since, in my opinione those are key for the entire performance. When recording I have used a “cat-light” to use as a prop to aim what I was saying to something so I made sure that was clear in the animation too. In the first part the hands move as to explain something or make a point and in the last part they clearly show the angriness of the character.

Methods for creating pose transitions using ‘biasing’ (easing/slow in and out)

To simplify the process of creating breakdown poses between the key poses that I have created for my performance I have used a Maya plugging called tween machine which helps animators to create breakdown poses in Maya on stepped curves.

After working on the animation with the tween machine and adjusting the animation and converting it to splines The overall hand and body moment was to working: it needed more life too still and the hand movement in particular was not correct since only the wrists were working instead of the arm.

To correct the arm moment I pinned the Pole elbow with rig to avoid just the wrist movements an excessive rotation (as it was before).

I have also added a spine movement (focusing on the rotation) which was lacking and the character looked too still. I have tried to sync the movement of the spine with the hand and the audio so that it would look natural. To remove the sense of “stillness” I have searched into moving hold in animation. A “moving hold” is basically just a way to have your character hold a key pose for a long time without looking dead and doing small adjustments movements that we also do in “real life” which can help understand the character mind. In this case, I created the “illusion” of the character breathing when there were long pauses between keyframes using the torso rotation since he was quite cross so its breathing was increased while shouting. I tried not to add to many keys for the moving hold otherwise it would have moved to mush too quietly resulting in an unnatural animation.

I have added a character which I have dowloaded from the school library, forky from the toy story series which I thought it would have added a “funny” elect to the animation since that he is so angry at an innocent, apparently lifeless character. I have also animated him slightly so that it would jump when the character slams his hand on the table and in the end I made him fall as it was “hit” by the characters words. I added a toy story wallpaper in the background that recalls forky.

Camera animation is an essential part of storytelling. Camera animation can be usually overlook, however a good camera move can solve a lot of problems and can help the animation process. Maya does not do it by default. In Maya there are different options for cameras: you can create a simple camera, a camera with aim where the aim is where the camera would point towards and the camera aim and up where you can lock the orientation of a camera. The default camera that you can create using Maya has 35 mm focal length. You can custom a camera in Maya which has the Pan, Roll and Pitch options just like a real camera on a tripod would have which represent different rotation and different camera shots. A pan shot involves the camera moving horizontally, so left to right and right to left; the Roll shot is the one where the camera rotates on its axis, titling; and the Pitch is the vertical rotation on its axis. It is better to create those channels for a camera since that the translate and the rotation of the three axis for a default camera in Maya have no hierarchy when we animate it, which could lead to a gimbal lock. A gimbal lock is when we have two rotation together and they lock so it would lead to maya data confusion not recognising which channel is which since they are exactly on top of each other. Having the camera created working with a resolution gate aside may be useful to see what we are actually framing with a camera. After we can create a overscan channel in the camera rig to adjust the resolution gate view. To help the framing process of a shot it might be useful to create and parent a “thirds grid” to place in front of the lens of the camera which would not show in the final rendering but it would help the animation process if we turn off the rendering attributes for it. Moreover if we create a boolean switch for it we can toggle its visibility in the viewport. Another element which can be customised is the focal length of the camera by creating a custom channel for it. The default focal length is 35 mm so you can add a minimum of 12 mm and a maximum of 100 mm for example. All these last attributes and channels are part of the camera itself so they should be added in the connection editor of the camera and be part of the nodes of the camera and be used as independent channels.

Camera moments in real world

Once the camera rig is done it is possible to create a Pan shot with it for instance. Using a ready scene we can animate the camera position form left to right to follow the characters as they move from left to right in the scene. These camera shots make up the foundation of good film in television. An elects which could make a difference while animating these types of shots is to think of the camera as an object being moved by a person: when creating the keys for the camera pan its always better to create a hold position when following a subject and moving slightly after it to replicate the actual movement of the camera man in real life and create an illusion of it which can contribute to add a nice touch to the overall animation.

This is the final playlist shot:

After the sessions on Matchmove and Tracking I completed this tracked shoot following what I have learned.

I first tracked some points in 3DE and Adjusted the lens and exported the maya script and the distorted footage

I then worked in maya according to the points I have tracked and modelled some building matching the footage.

I also snapped some cones on the tracked points to see the depth.

This is the showreel showing the three process wipes: Original footage, cones representing the tracking points and the wireframe of the models of the buildings.

Facial animation is the element that may be the most effective to convey the illusion of life: acting skills are required. Having a close-up reference for the animation makes easier to focus on the face expressions. The first step is to carefully listen to the dialog to animate and understand the accents and nuances and motivation behind those words too.

Foe example in my audio for the animation:

“For five minutes, could you not be yourself, for five minutes!”

Accents: the f’s are very stressed and “yourself” is highlighted and the f’s in the last “five minutes ” are even more highlighted since they are shouted.

Attitude: annoyed, angry, irritable

Subtext: I have very little patience and I am stressed I don’t need you to stress me too”

Once I have studied the audio creating a reference video is important so that once is ready making notes on the acting such as brows poses, eye darts, blinks.

When animating a Lip sync usually is better to start from the broad movement and then go into details, so it is better to start from a jaw bounce/motion rather than the mouth shapes since the initial timings for the jaw movements are easier to overlook it would be easier to say the words yourself to better understand the dynamic. The second element to work with are the mouth corners when the lip sync is actually animated. In this phase working in parallel with the graph editor could help focus onto the eases in the animation. After the mouth shapes are added which help refining the lip sync: a general rule is that vowels happen when we hear the sound in the frame, on the other hand consonants moth shapes should hit the shape one or two frames before the sound happens; this works even better for plosive consonants which require a buildup and release of air to be voiced. The next step is the tongue movement which help the credibility and add a natural movement and feel to the animation. The tongue should be seen when touching the top of the mouth, such as on “n” sounds.

Blinks comes after and help adding life to animation even more. There can be different kind of blinks: fast, slow, half blinks, fluttering eyes, takes, disbeliefs. Most of the time blinks are dictated by the emotion and thought process of the character (a natural effect for blink is to add a very slight up and down movement in the brows making the animation more organic).

Another important element of organic facial animation is eye darts, used to keep alive static moments of the animation, our eyes rarely stay focused on the exact same spot for more that a second. Decisions about eye darts depends on what we need to communicate about the character’s mental state. Using shapes for eyes darts movement can help, like triangles to use as a guide to choose the path for them to make.

When it comes to acting choices for animation there should be a reason for everything done if it does not have a justification it may mean that is not relevant.

Reference book

Naas, P., 2018. How to Cheat in Maya 2017. Milton: Chapman and Hall/CRC.

For this challenge we are going to use a short (one line) audio clip (from a movie) as a starting point for an ‘out of context’ performance animation. Out of context means that we leave the actor (who it is) and the movie it is taken from (what context it was in) behind and build the performance around a new character/staging idea. We are going to approach this in two parts, this week lip syncing and facial animation, the following week, full body performance. 

This week topic is about lip syncing an d performance is 3D animation. Lip syncing is the way the mouth moves, the way it represents phonetic and sound.

The first aspect of a lip sync and facial animation is the jaw bounce which is the underlying structure. A lip sync should be built upon a solid jaw bounce animation which gives it the correct rhythm and volume. a Facial animation should also capture emotions of the actions not just the movement and since this movement has a purpose it should match the dialogue.

There is a difference between animating in 2D or 3D. For 2D there can be found Phonemes which is a set of frames for lip sync phonetics and no interpolation (which is correct if the Animation is made of a series of drawings).

Visemes on the other hand deal with phonetics and interpolation which is perfect for 3D animation where the mouth morphs and it needs to be animated for the frames in-between and has a different dynamic.

there could be three different rigs for facial Animation:

• controls on the mouth (sculpting shapes)
• Slider/interface controls which is the type using for the workshop
• blend shapes channels

Before starting there should be made a difference between phonetics which is the study of sounds in all languages and phonology which is the study of the use of phonetic sounds in a specific language and context which will be useful for my animation.

In order to animate in a better way my character with the audio I should listen to it accurately for phonology inch check for pauses which could signify a change of thought and a change of thought indicated a change of pose, even if they are major or minor.

The goal for this animation is to create sound not written text.

For week 8:

Step 1: Find an audio clip

Audio Clip & Rig: Source/find a short audio clip (3 -10 seconds approx of one person talking) which will form the basis of a lip sync and facial animation sequence in the first instance and then later, a full body acted performance sequence (combining both face/lip syncing animation and body performance animation). It is therefore important that you…

• 1) Consider carefully which audio clip and rig you choose – Listen carefully to the audio clip and try to imagine it as an animated character.
• 2) Ignore the source of the clip – Which actor or film for example. The goal is to create your own performance.
• 3) Select a rig which suits the audio and is capable of lip syncing.
• 4) Consider the clip as potential ‘full performance’ beyond just lip syncing.
• 5) Record reference footage based upon the audio clip – Either yourself or a friend (no online downloads)
• 6) Prepare the reference footage and audio clip using Premiere and After Effects to use in Maya

Finally, once you have chosen your audio clip, animate a ‘jaw bounce & viseme’ lip sync sequence. Focusing only on the jaw rotate and viseme (wide’s, shorts, ins, and outs)

This is an audio clip I found on movie sound cloud central and is from “Shrek 2” and regards Shrek talking to Donkey.

Step 2: Act out (yourself or a friend) a performance to the audio (lip syncing)

https://vimeo.com/652162921

Step 3:  in After Effects I have converted the audio and matched it to my performance footage.

Step 4: In Maya, create a lip sync (jaw bounce and visemes only).

Jaw bounce

for the first part of the animation I concentrated on the face animation and in particular the jaw. the jaw bounce is 60% of the animation since it gives the rhythm and everything that comes next matches with it. So I matched the jaw bounce to the keyframes.

This is the interface I worked with to animate the face of the character on the right there are the controls for the mouth. on the timeline I have imported the wav audio I have worked with to animated the character together with it.

while animating I made sure to keyframe each control.

I after did the visages animation building up from the jaw bounce including the open and close, wide and short of the mouth and the curl in an out as well according to the audio as well. I made sure I did not overload the animation with keyframes and just emphasise the important sound:

“For five minutes… could you not be yourself for five minutes” (the audio I am working with)

I guess that even from how the words are spelled out the vocals here play an important role and the “not” since the character seems quite made to the character he is talking to.

Adding Facial Animation in Layers: Building up Performance

Facial animation: dialogue and acting words

add emotion in the other hemisphere of the face

motivation: muscles and primary movement

This is an important anatomy guideline to take in consideration while animating since it makes a clear distinction between muscle areas of the face, those that are going to move, and those like fat that are going to react to it or bone areas where there is going to be no movement at all.

A more detailed distinction is between primary movements such as the eyebrows and corners of the mouth, which movement effects other parts of the face – secondary areas of the mouth and eyes skin and reaction areas -.

Motivation thoughts and feelings

So far I worked on the southern hemisphere of the face, jaw bounce and visemes, which are linked to feelings, next part of the animation will be focused on the northern hemisphere which is connected to thoughts. These two parts overlap and blend with each other, but they can move independently from each other, for instance if someone is thinking they tend to do it with their eyebrows.

For eyebrows there is an inner structure too since that the inner part of it leads the strong movement the middle part is associated to the medium movement and the outside has a lighter movement. So, the inner and m middle parts are those leading the movement.

Depending on which part, the inner or middle movement, is leading the moment it conveys different emotions: if is the inner part the motivational movement it may convey thinking and is intentional, if is the middle part it conveys surprise and is uncontrolled.

Pupils

An interesting example of eyes structure is the one of Muppets: they have an inner triangle structure with the base vertices corresponding to the corners of the mouth and the vertex on top corresponding of the centre of the eyes. One peculiar aspects of Muppets is that the pupils of the eyes have a crossed eyes feature with leads to an “alive” focus of them since having them straight would take life out of them.

Stages:

I then focused the attention on building up the animation from the jaw bounce adding features such as the:

Corners of the mouth (attitude/emotion) and Lips using the mouth controls at the top adding keys for the specific position of the mouth especially during the consonants pronouncing, meaning that when for instance the mouth would be about to pronounce a word starting for “m” and “f” or “s” it would be going slightly up before dropping down (in this case the character is even shouting so it would be enhanced even more). I found quite hard to lip sync the word “minutes” since other that actually sync the work I had to convey the annoying accents the voice uses so it had to be scanned by time carefully. I also added the feature of the lower lip curling in when pronouncing the last “for five” so express the anger of the character.

The position of the teeth was also edited and adjusted to match the mouth movement and I also made sure that it would not seem like it moved independently from it.

Cheek puffing out (& sucking in) – extremely useful to add a natural movement to the cheek before pronouncing some consonants such as “f” “s” (lines of the audio “for five” repeated twice and “self”).

When the mouth moves, especially with very pronounced jaw bounces just like in this case, the tip of the nose tends to make tiny movements so adding this to the animation it would have improved its credibility.

Step 3: Convert the audio (if needed) and match it to your performance footage

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Using sync sketch I have created a sketched version of the close up footage reference for the performance video where I studied the main eyebrows moment and annotated them in the keyframe es so that I could have imported them in Maya. One thing I have noticed is that the more the voice sounded annoyed especially during “could you not be yourself” the more eyebrows up movement was increased (middle brow leading the movement) and during the last second while the voice is shouting the eyebrows point toward the centre of the face (inner brow leading the movement).

After this study I started animating the character in maya creating the main eyebrow key moments according to the video.

I first created the global up/down brow moment and after added the details and after working with the eye brow detailed shapes.

I have after corrected the brows movement in the graph editor and I have noticed that the inner brow and translate x m movements of the two brows were not corresponding.

One element that give the last illusion of life movement was the Eye balls and Eye lids/sockets animation which I have created according to the reference I have recorded.

this is the final face animation playlist

This challenge is an ‘upscale’ of the first body mechanics challenge and the goal here is join motions. For example, running and jumping or walking and then sitting. You should focus on movement, not performance (acting and pantomime).

Advanced Body Mechanics (Blocking Out): Using your footage and stepped keyframes, establish the ‘storytelling’ poses, trajectory of the COG/Root of the person’s motion, and the arcs of the spine. You may wish to ‘draw on your footage’ to explore these and use your footage (as an image sequence) to rotoscope in Maya. This will form the block out stage of your animation. Whilst not complete, the DNA of the motion and arcs should be clear at this stage.

1) Building upon your blocked out animation, add breakdown/ inbetween poses to help complete arcs (motion) and give rhythm to the animation.

I first switched in the animation settings the stepped keyframes to create the blocking pose of the animation.

To help with the set of keyframes O have created a character set allowing me to select all the controls at once using the script editor and created a character set with the global control I have created.

I next started to block the keys on 8’s and after the breakdowns on 4’s following the image plain I have imported in the viewport.

One aspect I have noticed is that compared to the first part of body mechanics, I was faster and I had a clearer process in mind on how to approach the animation, both knowing what to do, such as check for the pole vectors position, start to build a pose from the root control, and what to avoid, such as unnecessary rotation of controls adding not too many keyframes: in general I anticipated the possible mistakes I could have committed.

I have also created the ball animation and for the first part I parented the hand control with the ball and I animated the keys for the parenting turned it off with the character throws the ball in the air.

2) Convert you stepped animation to Spline and clean up your curves in the Graph Editor (be careful not to over polish)

I cleaned the animation and the splines starting from the root control.

converted stepped into spline and polish everything knee popping caused by sudden changes in rotation of the feet

A difficult part was to establish the hand and elbow pole control position for the hand that smashes the ball.

After I checked the Root arcs were clean before polishing the spine, checking for ‘weight, force, and impact’. With the help of a grease pencil I have designed the curve path of the spine in the key moments of the movement. I have also checked with the reference for the right balance of the body and the correct orientation as the character smashes the ball and I have noticed that the character was not rotated enough.

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

• 

Finally, I checked the arcs of the limbs to ensure the mechanics and forces were strong.

While blocking the animation I have noticed that I have added too many keyframes in some parts, so I have corrected this and got rid of unnecessary keys.

I have also corrected I slight knee popping in the same foot that was caused both from the root and the heel roll sudden changes happening in near keys.

In the right foot there was a popping (it rotated forward/back in a repeated poses). 

So I tried to spread the rotation in time and Adjusted also the translation of the foot too since it was wrong and positioned too much forward and was not contributing to the balance of the body.

Fo the hand that is smashing the ball I thought at first to replace it with FK controls to solve th elbow popping problem it had. However I tried to polish it first at this stage as much as possible by understanding its dynamic too through the reference and by doing the movement myself and I was able to find the correct path for the elbow.

3) Check the COG/Root arcs (motion path) are clean before polishing the spine, checking for ‘weight, force, and impact’ where required.

gamble lock two circular controls rotating on the same plain object can move unexpectedly in between two keyframes

In fact that is what happened to the hand smashing the ball so while rotating to of the rotate splines overlapped (x and Y) so I also tried to adjust them in the graph.

4) Global retiming

After I polished everything I decided to do a global retiming which helped the fluidity and added a more natural effect to the animation.

5) Playblast & add After Effects Pixel Motion Blur

After the retiming I playblasted the animation chosing the framing of the camera and added a motion blur effect in after effects.