Pass 2 & Shelves

Lip Sync

I started out this week much more confident--Norman's textures are basically complete, and the eyebrow dilemma is over...so for the most part I can focus on his animation, start adding more in-betweens, and really hone the movement of the piece. Watching the blocking at the beginning I was having serious trouble figuring out what additional poses were needed--the movement is very simple and subtle, and there isn't much of it. I realized that a lot of the focus of these shots is the lip sync--I set everything up to allow certain shots that showcase the lip sync.

As with any music video, the singer can't be doing very much or the viewer won't see the lip sync (unless they strap a camera to the singer's face--but thats for a very specific effect). So I unintentionally started working on the lip sync--and lo and behold I got renewed excitement for the piece generally. The lip sync was why I wanted to create a music video in the first place--honestly there is just something inherently cool about bringing a character to life to the point that they have a voice. As I worked on the lip sync I started to remember what Leif and Nick had said last semester about letting the voice inform the character's movement...pay attention for where they breathe, make sure the body moves accordingly---etc. We was shown the video below last semester as proof that the body movement is far more important for selling that the voice comes from that person than the lip sync. The video is a commercial for Stroh's Light Beer where they really convincingly took footage of Fidel Castro and changed the voice, but his gestural emphasis matches the new voice, so it works even though the lips obviously don't match:



Leif was also right on in choosing to build Norman with mouth blend shapes but no specific blend shapes for phonemes--the rig allows mouth shapes to vary depending on the expression on the face. It makes for a really natural looking lip sync with a lot of flexibility---instead of the entire mouth reshaping for each shape, the rig allows subtle movement, like real human lip movement.

Up to this point I had it in my head to wait to do the lip sync--everyone told me to hold off and get everything else done first. As a result I wasn't animating to the lyrics--I did have the body movement relate to the music, but not to the voice--the most important part!

So, between yesterday and today I did the first pass of the lip sync and I'm pretty happy...it definitely needs work, but parts of it look really good. After finishing the lip sync this morning I spent most of the day duplicating the planet pieces and constraining them to his hands--really trying to hone the movement and putting together of the puzzle. It's definitely feeling more solid and the movement makes more sense--though I have had one technical problem thats just cost some time. Since I created the planet with levels of groups so that I could snap each piece back to O and animate the group above it once pieces are fit together, the duplicating and constraining process was more complicated than I had envisioned. I had to figure out how to match the constrained pieces to the referenced ones so that I could switch back to the referenced version when each piece is added. Unfortunately I didn't know a better way then to try to match the pieces as closely as I could. Fortunately, the side benefit is that instead of the pieces sliding in seamlessly, they now jiggle in, a much more realistic movement--by animating the hands accordingly, it really feels as though Justin is coordinating these pieces realistically instead of robotically, perfectly sliding them together. So far this solution seems to be working nicely--we'll see what happens when I spline!

Customizing Shelves



I've been slowly coming up with solutions to automate actions that I do all the time to save me some energy. I started by creating really simple keys to snap the timeline to individual shot lengths--this allows quick viewing of shots and an easy way to see all the keys of a shot on the timeline without needing the graph editor. Then when I created the texturing, having them visible slowed the computer down significantly just in tumbling through space--so I created keys that use a for loop to turn texturing visibility on or off for all the pieces currently selected (I need some of them to be visible--like the eyes, or I can't see the pupils). Finally, Stephan gave me a highend3d shelf (pictured above) for the Human rig that he modified for Norman last semester. Its a simple shelf, the buttons merely select the corresponding control curve--but the image buttons are really helpful--and save a few modifications I had to do to the script because of reference prefixes, it was really easy to convert the images for a mac and get the buttons to work on Justin.

Finally, for when I move from blocked to splined animation, to make sure that everything is keyed at every blocked pose, I created two buttons, a trans and a rot button which select all controls that have either translate or rotate key-ability. I will have to select the extra attributes separately (eyebrows, eyes, mouth (+ tongue), hands, and feet--not to mention the pieces. However, this will automate my locking down of poses much more efficiently.