Progress for final assignment 3 >:3

I have officially completed all animation,lighting and rendering.... But i encountered problems with the fusing of the sound clip and the original batch render video(which also happens to be fast forwarded by 3 seconds) :(.
Adobe Primiere Pro has problems processing my batch render and all i could see is a black screen @.@...

Thus I had to re-export the batch render in Windows Movie Maker in order to fuse the soundclip with the video and re-adjust the fps rate in Adobe Primiere Pro. However, this processed downed the quality of the video. I've tried rendering it in PNG.. but it seems that Primiere Pro does not support the file as well!! :'(.

Oh wells,
here is an earlier video i playblasted, it consists of the completed lipsync of the sound clip.

lip sync without actions





and this is the final video with actions that's zoomed in from the original finalised video
Final PlayBlast CloseUp

Progress for final assignment RESEARCH

It is really difficult to start off animating anything without any references at all. So here are some of the references and tips that I have and will be following for my animation.

First off, this is a phonemic chart that i've found over at danfergusdesign. At that page, it has a compilation of a few phonemic charts(2D & 3D) which might prove useful as a reference for lip syncing.

this chart itself shows not only the basic phonemes but also how the lips will look like along with the strong pronounciation of certain letters

Interestingly, during my search for more relevant information, I found this animation done by DJ Hoski with the Hogan rig.

This video might not be the best, but it helped me to understand how characterisation works. The arms, facial, body movement all adds to creating a character. Thus I'll be adding in this into my own animations.

I remember Mr.Willy showing us a video of DJ Nicke, with him giving a tutorial on lip syncing. I found his webpage and in his post " How to make lip-syncing easy", he shows us a 4-step technique that can be used to "speed up our lip-syncing animation" xD.

here is the link

Good luck to all with your submissions! :)

Progress for final assignment 2 >:3

So i've started lip syncing...

I placed a palm size mirror in between my monitor and my keyboard and adjusted it so that i can only see my lips. And i started chanting the words that i am animating over and over again in order to animate the lips of devil hogan more accurately...
Oh god! i look funny doing that!!

Progress for final assignment >:3

For this assignment, I will be working on Captain Jack Sparrow's famous "Dishonest" Quote. Basically, i came up with an idea with a reporter interviewing a devil. As you can probably guess, the quote will be said by the devil :3. In the picture below, textures and environment objects are still missing. but they will be all up probably by tomorrow.

That's all for now!

Hogan and his ice cream xD

Hogan's expression Before, and After dropping his ice cream.

Initially, i wanted to make Hogan mimic a TV-advertisement where the ice-cream sales person did a stunt by dropping an ice-cream into his mouth. But i did not know how to make an animation appear in the TV i modelled thus i cut that out and made Hogan do the stunt instead :D. Hope you all like it!

Motion Capture

Kai Lin and I were talking about Motion Capture and we were talking about how good they actually look. If you have seen her blog, you would have seen the Hatsune Miku's Levan Polka dance and the opening of Final Fantasy X2 (sorry for being a final fantasy freak hahaha).If not, it's at the bottom of this post. Im now wondering if those videos were mixed mocap + keyframe animation because they look pretty impressive!

Remember the video that was shown to us in class by Mr.Willy?
The zombie dance from Final Fantasy:The Spirits Within?

The entire movie was actually Mocapped as said. While searching for other Final Fantasy mocap videos, i stumbled upon this :). I thought that it's pretty cool so i shall share it will you guys :)




It is actually the process of how mocap works and what the actors do behind the scenes :).
If you have seen the description of the video, it is actually the"first theatrically released motion capture feature film". xD
That was actually released in year 2001.. so considering the amount of time that has passed, mocap actually improved(in my opinion) as can be seen from the videos below!

Hatsune Miku's Leven Polka


FFX2 opening, Yuna's song

Expressions

This exercise made me think about factors such as

In my opinion, "Trust" and "Disgust" is two of the toughest expression to capture as "Trust" is a believe and I tend to observe trust based on verbal contexts instead of expressions.. Google did not help much with this.. so all I can do is to visualise the expression of what I have seen in Japanese Animations when a character says "I TRUST YOU" xD.

It is difficult to get "Disgust" right as over-exaggeration will make Hogan look like he's angry or sad. After googling, a "Disgusted" face is usually observed by the lifting of the upper lips,a parted mouth, narrowed eyes and a wrinkled nose. Hogan don't happen to have a nice nose and I couldn't wrinkled it even if i added the nose in.. This took away some chances to make the expression "Disgust" more realistic. I hope he don't look too angry in this picture @.@.

The rest of the emotions were pretty straight forward to capture. Thus, I hope i did a good job with them! :)