Face Materials

After boning Terry and playing with morpher to move his mouth, I wasn't happy with how the material on his face was distorting when his mouth moved. I took a photo of my personal alarm clock and edited the photo of Photoshop to take away the hands and centre ring. I then added these to Terry as a bitmap.

I still wasn't happy with this material, mainly due to how Terry ended up looking like he had eaten some numbers every time he opened his mouth. To avoid this issue I used a multi-sub object material to make the inside of his mouth black.

In the Polygon Material ID section I assigned the outside of Terry's face to the clock bitmap via smoothing group 1, I then selected the polygons inside Terry's mouth and assigned them to smoothing group two and put a matte black vinyl material on it via the material editor.

Boning Terry

As my character is an alarm clock.. I decided that he should look and act to an extent as an alarm clock would with regard to his movements. My animation is based largely on facial expression as the bells (which will move to dictate the ringing and hopefully some body language) and legs are the only limbs that I will bone and rig on my character. The main body of Terry will act as a regular alarm clock body and be rigid as I don't feel it would add very much to the animation and I foresee it creating problems.

I wish for the face of Terry to show his impatient nature and demonstrate his very short fuse.. getting angry when people don't wake up and pay attention to the time/him. This I will demonstrate through his frustration.

Here are the bones that Terry has in his limbs.

Characterisation

Throughout the animating process I have constantly been thinking about the character of my piece. I found this piece (see below) on "lazy-villains" by a writer that inspired me to keep my character mute (no generic evil laugh!) to an extent (there is an audio soundtrack to the piece). I have also (through anthropomorphism) tried to step away from the 'typical' villain. I wanted to use the research I had gathered on existing villains and use some of the traits in my character but not to make a clone of a pre-existing character. The brief was to generate a new villain so that is what I hope I have achieved through my work.

http://nusseymagazine.com/abigailnussey/?p=455

Facial Expression - Storyboard

To enhance the believability of Terry in my animation I took a series of videos of a willing participant to act out the story board I had created so that I had some real facial expressions for which to translate onto my character. Below are the videos taken, put into sequence with premiere pro.

Terry's Mouth Can Move!

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.

Research - Facial Expression

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.

'Sir' Terry's Mouth

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.