Using morpher, I cloned Terry's clock face and by editing them seperately into various facial expressions (focusing on the mouth at this time) using the edit poly mode, I then linked them onto my original model and using SetKey, I manipulated the values of each mouth movement to make Terry move.
I then rendered this animation to see how it would look in my animation with materials and such. In retrospect I should've rendered every nth frame as my tutor suggested for my test render. This is a lesson I have learnt after a significant amount of time spent waiting for this 3 second video to render! I guess this is all part of learning to animate :)
The rendered video of Terry and the beginnings of his mouth movement;
Here you can see the beginnings of Terry's movements although work will have to be done to ensure the mouth is a lot smoother around the edges and also his eyes and the rest of his face will have to be manipulated to really acheive the desirable effect.
To get the right facial expression in my animation to portray the right emotion and be clear to the audience in terms of storyline I have been researching into different facial expressions. To start with I have been looking at the mouth and the different shapes I will have to create in morpher to allow Terry's mouth to move in a realistic fashion.
Here is a female mouth using the different movements to create certain shapes. Taking this as a starting point I have (using morpher) constructed some mouth shapes for Terry.
I have also been looking at the mouth shapes created by speech to use with Terry, even if I decide that he will be a mute character I thought it best to have the option of speech.
Following my research into the mouth movement to use with Terry, I then went on to do rather a lot of research into facial expressions used by actors to convey different types of emotion.
The following YouTube video is particularly helpful in explaining certain aspects of expression. For example, this professional actor suggests widening the eyes 35-40% without moving the upper brow to convey anger in the eyes.
Following this research I hope to convince a friend to let me film him acting out my storyboard as 'Sir' Terry, to capture the essence of emotion I wish to portray through my animation. I hope that this will be a very useful project in creating 'real' emotion in my piece.
Here I have added a mouth to 'Sir' Terry, and I have been working on using morpher to animate the different facial expressions, currently regarding the mouth.
Above you can see I have added a clock face bitmap for Terry's face. It works as a temporary material but I am hoping to take my own photograph to use as a bitmap for Terry's final skin.
