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.

Sir Terry Timepiece -An Initial Model (and an unfortunate discovery!)

Here you see the beginnings of 'Sir' Terry Timepiece. 

I have used the eyes from my original cartoon rat character for ease and created a model that will become my final character. I wanted a relatively simple model so that rendering won't be a big issue and I stuck to the general look of an alarm clock that many people could relate to in terms of form and structure (minus the eyes of course!) 

The next part I will be focusing on will be Terry's mouth which will be integral to the facial expressions I have illustrated on my storyboard. I also want to texture him to look relatively realistic with bronze/gold coloured bells, ceramic/painted metallic body and plastic facial features.

Unfortunately or fortunately... I'm not really sure which yet, whilst continuing to research alarm clocks and how they can be animated effectively, I came across this short animation on YouTube. 

It has a lot of very similar attributes to my proposed theme and idea, without however, the main idea that I will be showing the frustration of Terry through his facial expression cementing his character as the antagonist of the piece. I think that after finding this video I will go out and film some people getting frustrated and angry, and use their facial expressions to help me turn Terry into much more of an annoyed and temperamental character rather that will move my final piece further away from this idea.

I may however still decide on changing my idea completely if I feel that I cannot move far enough away from this piece which is a little too close to my original idea for my liking.

A Couple of Tutorials

1. Cartoon Eyes

In this tutorial we learnt how to create some cartoon style boggly eyes, complete with movable blinking eyelids. Using basic spheres I modeled the eyes, with two eyelids (upper and lower) and also the head and nose of my rat creature. I then modeled two large ears by manipulating a further two spheres. Using FFD boxes I was able to warp and manipulate the head, nose and eyes into the shapes that I wanted. I used the FFD boxes on each eye and its counterparts to create a sneaky and villainous look for my character which I thought turned out quite well. I added two look at constraints, one on each eye so that the direction of the pupils could be moved independently. I made the pupils follow the shape of each eye to add to the overall shifty look of my rodent.

I particularly enjoyed this tutorial and think that eyes such as these will work really well in my chosen villain Sir Terry Timepiece, although I do quite like my rat character which I will keep incase my whole idea changes or I end up including him as a secondary character in my final animation.

2. Boning and Skinning

In this tutorial we learnt about boning and skinning a model so that it can be moved and manipulated for animation using bipeds and rigging. Initially I modeled a simple figure to which I could add some bones. I then used the biped to add his bones, manipulating them to fit his limbs and moving them into position. From this I then added a skin modifier to attach the model to the rig. This didn't work as planned. unfortunately the model and rig did not like the idea of becoming linked by skinning and even though the bones were added correctly to the skin modifier, both entities seemed determined to stay isolated. I continued to try this method and even completely re-modeled my figure due to his feet originally being at a strange angle to his legs (see above) even this, however did not fix the issue. I then tried using the physique modifier instead and manipulated the envelopes to encompass my whole model. This worked in a sense, in the issue regarding the model and rig becoming linked, it did not however work well. Every time I tried to move the rig, various sections of my model's arm would twist in on itself and I was at a bit of a loss as to how to fix this. 

Although this tutorial was not entirely successful, it did help me to understand the techniques used and I intend to use bones to create a rig for Sir Terry that will fit his proportions correctly which I will then use and hopefully link using the skin modifier once I have figured out what my issue was. 

Initial Storyboard

Here I have sketched out a preliminary storyboard for 'Sir' Terry Timepiece (please excuse the glaring misspelling of 'initial'). I decided on a small sketch in where Terry tries to do his duty and wake up the boy in his bed but as he does so, realises that the boy is ignoring him and starts to get more and more frustrated and angry as he tries fruitlessly so wake up the snoozing boy. Eventually this frustration and anger cause him to stray to close to the edge of the chest of drawers which inevitably leads Terry to his demise as he falls from the dizzying heights of the bedside cabinet and onto the floor below with a crash. 

To gain a better visual depiction of how this scene would look, I decided to colour this storyboard in Photoshop which can be seen below.

Character Development

During tutorial 2 we did a task that involved creating a persona for a generic character to make him more unique and to give him characteristics that make him more of a character with a back story. On the left you can see the character and the features I gave to him to make him more believable and lifelike.












As the tutorial above had shown, I needed to create a persona for my chosen character. To start with I decided on what my character would actually be.

I asked a couple of friends and family to ask their relatives between the ages of 7 and 11 who their favourite villains were and also what they dislike most. Many of the responses I got were the characters that I had already researched. The most interesting answers I received were to the "What do you dislike most?" question. To this question, the responses varied including school, getting up for school, bedtime, peas and spiders. I particularly identified with 'getting up for school' because my personal villain is my alarm clock and getting up for work! I then decided that as most of my sketches and research thus far had led me down the rather stereotypical route of how villainy has been portrayed, I thought that I would avoid this by making my character not look particularly menacing on face value but rather have an evil streak. Taking how the Beano's depicted villainous behaviour using the facial features of the character, I thought I could still create a 'villain' but avoid the trappings of his or her appearance being too obvious.




A favourite character of mine of all time has to be Pixar's Luxo Lamp, becoming integrated with the companies identity and the short animation of the big and small lamp of the same name.

I particularly like this character and animation because the character and expression of both lamps are so clear and yet the lamps do not even have faces. Using this idea I thought that I could perhaps create a villain from an everyday object, namely my alarm clock.

As you can see on the left, I started to brainstorm my alarm clock's persona and his characteristics.



On the right I started to generate an illustrative depiction of how my alarm clock might look. During my time spent sketching how my alarm clock might look I remembered Disney's Beauty and the Beast had a clock character called Cogsworth which I decided to research for inspiration.

Cogsworth 

 Researching Cogsworth online led me to some sketched expressions of Cogsworth. I sketched these out myself adding an alarm clock surround on a couple to see how a face would work within my idea. The original sketch image can be found at the link below.

I found I really liked the idea of using a face as the expression would be much clearer and presumably stronger for the young audience to pick up on.

http://superramen.deviantart.com/art/More-Cogsworth-Expressions-87186137

Whilst primarily focusing on expression and visual research to do with Cogsworth (as I didn't want to be influenced too heavily on using similar aspects for my alarm clock fellow) I did stumble upon a biography of Cogsworth that I thought gave an accurate description of his persona.



I decided to use categories that had been used to describe Cogsworth and relate them to my own character.

Here is the character development that I came up with for my character, now christened 'Sir' Terry Timepiece. I decided he is not officially knighted, however he likes the title and thinks that it gives him status, which he is very preoccupied with as he feels that good timekeeping and punctuality are of the utmost importance.

For clarity I have re-typed 'Sir' Terry's final biography here;

Name:  'Sir' Terry Timepiece

Personality:  Terry is pompous, self-important, has a superiority complex, rude, abrupt, annoying and suffers OCD regarding time keeping and punctuality

Appearance:  Short in stature, slightly plump, unfit (winding gives him extra energy), he has a moustache (the hands of the clock face) large goggly eyes, two alarm bells on his head and two stumpy little legs

Goal:  To make the world realise the importance of punctuality and get everyone up on time, more specifically his 'person' Timmy

Home:  Timmy's bedside cabinet

Affiliations and Allies:  Terry is a bit of a loner, no real friends to speak of although he has a soft spot for Timmy's wristwatch Tracy

Enemies:  More modern timepieces such as digital alarm clocks, mobile phone alarm clocks and he hates cockerels 

Likes:  Terry loves to watch the sunrise, he enjoys waking people and takes pleasure from startling people. He likes traditional mechanics such as clockwork, cogs and gears. He collects stamps, enjoys playing with stray bits of blue tack with his little legs and he secretly likes the pat on the head he receives after waking someone up

Dislikes:  Daylight saving time. He hates people who are early and despises people who are late. He also dislikes laziness

Powers/Abilities:  Can ring his alarm bells at will, always has the correct time

Fate:  Terry is replaced by a digital radio after smashing on the floor of Timmy's room

Quotes:  Terry likes to quote Louis the XVIII of France "Punctuality is the politeness of kings" (this is another reason he likes to refer to himself as 'Sir' Timepiece)