Animated Character - Head shot

[LMUSIC]

This is my first character model. I'm not very speedy, so I have been working on 'her' for some time.

I used the approach from the polygon hair tutorial and animated it with cloth dynamics.

The eyes are controlled with a bone rig I cooked up to move the eye balls and the eye lids together.

The mouth is also controlled with bones. So the entire animation is moved the old fashioned way, entirely keyframed.

Comments are welcome.

http://home.comcast.net/~lesmusic/StillTheOne3a.wmv

Enjoy,

[tonsofpcs]

Its looking great!
The one thing I notice, when she looks toward the camera, I see a spot where her bangs meet the top of her head, there is a dark patch.

[shaol]

First good job on doing animation on a topic thats not easy to do. I think your sync is off alittle where the movement of the mouth is not the right opening for the sound. It seemed not enogh movement? did you break down the voice over to get the mouth movement time line if so can you post that. Just some tweeking and you'll have a nice piece. :D

[LMUSIC]

tonsofpcs:
I know what you mean. That poly hair approach is OK, but it can really be a challenge when things start moving.

That 'bald spot' was really noticable until I put some matching shoe polish on her scalp!

The motion was done in LW7.5. I haven't gotten the recipe to work as well yet in LW8 (yet).

shaol:
I did layout the timeline for the primary sounds, but it was on a piece of paper that has since vanished. It was the usual 'AHH at frame 47' kind of thing. And looking in the mirror to see what that meant visually.

Then I filled in the intermediate positions to control transitions a little.

I remember that since the voice is set to a pattern, it made it easier to locate the key frames.

The mouth was keyframed first. There are a lot of bones (about 14) in the jaw / chin / lips. This was the first one of these rigs I setup, so they aren't very friendly to operate.

The eyes were rigged later and were initially a mess, too. I figured out a nice simple two bone control for the eye and eye lid bones. That works great!

I plan to use the same idea to overhaul the mouth controls pretty soon (in dinasaur minutes), so I hope to correct the timing problems you noticed.

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Thanks for your comments.
Les