Miro Board:
https://miro.com/app/board/uXjVOpvOHMI=/?share_link_id=860325836381
storyboard
This week I have created the storyboard which helped me visualise the idea and clearly convey how the story will flow, as you can see how the shots work together. It also allowed me to see potential problems that would not go unnoticed saving me time. (how long the informations should be displayed or in which form -letters-; find the meaning of the actions and the reason to include them in the animation).
face topology
How to structure the change in direction around the face with the edge loops.
The face has a lot of twists and turns in terms of his muscle structure and the way it goes around the face. These changes are represented by five stars poles around the structure of the face and generally are in these locations: the tip of the nose bridge, the corner of the eye on the outside, the middle of the cheek, the point in which the nose meet the cheek and the upper cheek bone. All these points represent the changes in direction of the musculature of the face around the eye as it transitions into the cheek, the jaw, the nasolabial crease and the mouth(pentagonal shape around the eye: within the pentagon you end up with continuous loops to fill out the upper cheek the lower brow and the eyelids). For the mouth there is a similar process: there is a star near the change of the direction of the musculature near the jaw and the mouth. (an additional loop around the eye can help when rigging for smiles, working as an intersection in the change of direction between the cheeks, the forehead and the mouth. For the mouth, is good to have one edge loop that goes over the nose and around the chin to form the nasolabial crease. Is important to have level of symmetry throughout the structure of the upper and lower lids. the area of the eyelids has four general quadrants: so the upper left, the upper right the lower left and the lower right (same for the lips). Around the cheeks is where you get a mesh like structure, uniform across the board with no loops. There is an overall loop the travels around the face to frame the jawline and the forehead. The amount of spans between the lower and upper eyelids and lips has to be even to make rigging easier. There should not be any stars in the centre of the face. In the lips there is a loop that follows the nasolabial crease of the face, inside of that there are some infinite loops that sits within that nasolabial crease to form the lips. There is also an identical amount of spans on the top and bottom of the lip travelling up the nose to the skull and the polygons can be reduced at the base of the skull as the topology is built.
second video I have used as a reference:
key loops in the face: eyes, muzzle. mouth the perimeter of the face. It makes it easier to connect the dots. Loops should be symmetrical vertically as well as horizontally.
In the following images I have tried to plan the key topology points of my model face:
painting technique research:
In order to get the 2D style I am looking for to render the images for the animation I have carried some research on other films that involve this technique.
Since Robin Williams’ character is a fan of impressionistic paintings, he imagines an afterlife created by brushstrokes.The visual effects for the painted world of What Dreams May Come would take the concept of optical flow – where every pixel is tracked in a moving image – to new levels in order to turn liveaction scenes into paintings in motion.
https://theasc.com/magazine/nov98/dreamsFX/pg1.htm
http://www.vfxhq.com/1998/dreams.html
this tutorial could be useful to create the starry night painting sky where I would like to include some moving particles.
In the following paper is discussed a software that the authors developed to create impressionist style of painting starting from “normal” images. Using a region based approach allows them to create out-put images in which the style of the brush strokes varies radically depending on the region. This is a feature some-times seen in Van Gogh’s paintings, it is particularly re-markable in landscapes such as Starry Night and someof his self portraits. Background regionsare filled with long curling strokes arranged in turbulentpatterns, while a more conservative style is used in ar-eas of greater detail.
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/221474872_Interactive_vector_fields_for_painterly_rendering