Here's something I've been working on the last couple of days. I've been trying to tweak the lighting and work more on the facial movements like you guys suggested. It's not perfect but I think its a step in the right direction.
[video=youtube;GRppN7RAMAg]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GRppN7RAMAg&feature=youtu.be[/video]
Any comments or criticisms welcome!
Mouth movements are a little choppy, so I would focus on smoothing them out.
Something that may help is getting the normal movements down first like you want them, so him moving around the scene.
Then move onto doing the facial movements afterwards. It'll allow you to focus on just one aspect the entire time, and may end with a better result.
[QUOTE=Nookyava;51326741]Mouth movements are a little choppy, so I would focus on smoothing them out.
Something that may help is getting the normal movements down first like you want them, so him moving around the scene.
Then move onto doing the facial movements afterwards. It'll allow you to focus on just one aspect the entire time, and may end with a better result.[/QUOTE]
A good example of this would be to record yourself doing these actions for a base, then tweak it to fit the character.
[QUOTE=Nookyava;51326741]Mouth movements are a little choppy, so I would focus on smoothing them out.
Something that may help is getting the normal movements down first like you want them, so him moving around the scene.
Then move onto doing the facial movements afterwards. It'll allow you to focus on just one aspect the entire time, and may end with a better result.[/QUOTE]
That's how I went about it this time through, though I kinda slacked on it.
I overdid the lipsync a bit because with the last two videosI did I smoothed it out too much and at times they looked like they had peanut butter in their mouth. It's tough finding that sweet spot.
[QUOTE=UncleJimmema;51326755]That's how I went about it this time through, though I kinda slacked on it.
I overdid the lipsync a bit because with the last two videosI did I smoothed it out too much and at times they looked like they had peanut butter in their mouth. It's tough finding that sweet spot.[/QUOTE]
basically, find the words and syllables that need emphasis, and do hard cuts there. if i said [URL="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rvZjb253DzA"]this quote[/URL] from the engineer, i've found the bolds to be the sharp points of the sentence:
"y[B]ou d[/B]one [B]in[/B]c[B]uur[/B]ed m[B]y[/B] w[B]ra[/B]ith, s[B]o[/B]n."
do what you did in this video onto only those bolded parts and you might find it'll have a little more bite without being too peanut buttery. also, as a side note, start with the mouth and animate from there. have the mouth and the emotion of the words drive the character's movement. a little synced head movement goes a long way.
it'll take time to really nail it down to a science, but just practice and find what words and letters require the most out of your mouth to say, and go from there. we don't struggle with it day to day, but imagine speaking if your muscles had 1/8th of the strength they had, and slow things down to really get a good idea of what beats need to be hit. and learn what transitions between words can be smoothed out vs. having hard movements like you had here. also, don't be afraid to do something strange, because if you need to add emphasis to a line for comedy or drama or what have you, then add emphasis to those lines.
To add on to the advice, I do my animating (for lip-synced elements) in four passes.
Pass 1 is the "core" motions, getting all the major parts where they need to be, when they need to be. It's a method very similar to blocking, but I don't use step curves, but rather use splines, so I can see if there is any clipping and such that I can correct right then. Basically it's classic blocking and classic refining all in one pass - I just find it more intuitive that way.
Pass 2 is the "detail" motions. This is things like build-up and follow-through for extremity motions (for example, if a character goes from default-hand-pose to pointing, then Pass 1 would just be a straight spline from A to B, whereas Pass 2 would add the hand recoiling a bit before the spline, and then have the hand recovering a bit after the spline), idle breathing / swaying motions, and non-essential finger-posing.
Pass 3 is the "lip-sync" pass, and does exactly as it says on the tin. I focus only on the mouth motions. I lip-sync in the Graph Editor (well, I do [B]all[/B] my animating up to this point in the Graph Editor), and I lip-sync on 1/12th-second intervals, meaning every 2 frames at 24 frames-per-second. Once I have all the lip motions made, I do interframe adjustments for things that need it (mostly talking fast, like at the end of this video; this ends up with a key on every frame), and then respline everything to make the motions nice and smooth.
Pass 4 is the "expression" phase, which is where I sync the head motions and body motions, using the Motion Editor, to the audio, providing emphasis and such when necessary. The rest of facial animation, such as eyebrows moving, eyes darting around, eyelids blinking, lip corners turning up/down, cheeks raising, is also done during this pass, using the Graph Editor so I can properly spline it all.
Obviously this isn't the only way to animate, nor is it a "traditionally taught" way, but it works for me, and for what I do, I think it comes out quite effectively.
[QUOTE=Gmod4ever;51327513]To add on to the advice, I do my animating (for lip-synced elements) in four passes.
Pass 1 is the "core" motions, getting all the major parts where they need to be, when they need to be. It's a method very similar to blocking, but I don't use step curves, but rather use splines, so I can see if there is any clipping and such that I can correct right then. Basically it's classic blocking and classic refining all in one pass - I just find it more intuitive that way.
Pass 2 is the "detail" motions. This is things like build-up and follow-through for extremity motions (for example, if a character goes from default-hand-pose to pointing, then Pass 1 would just be a straight spline from A to B, whereas Pass 2 would add the hand recoiling a bit before the spline, and then have the hand recovering a bit after the spline), idle breathing / swaying motions, and non-essential finger-posing.
Pass 3 is the "lip-sync" pass, and does exactly as it says on the tin. I focus only on the mouth motions. I lip-sync in the Graph Editor (well, I do [B]all[/B] my animating up to this point in the Graph Editor), and I lip-sync on 1/12th-second intervals, meaning every 2 frames at 24 frames-per-second. Once I have all the lip motions made, I do interframe adjustments for things that need it (mostly talking fast, like at the end of this video; this ends up with a key on every frame), and then respline everything to make the motions nice and smooth.
Pass 4 is the "expression" phase, which is where I sync the head motions and body motions, using the Motion Editor, to the audio, providing emphasis and such when necessary. The rest of facial animation, such as eyebrows moving, eyes darting around, eyelids blinking, lip corners turning up/down, cheeks raising, is also done during this pass, using the Graph Editor so I can properly spline it all.
Obviously this isn't the only way to animate, nor is it a "traditionally taught" way, but it works for me, and for what I do, I think it comes out quite effectively.[/QUOTE]
I mostly use the motion editor for lip-synce, It allows me to get the "hard" phonemes in fairly quick. It's getting them all to smooth out correctly that can be problematic. I know with certain mouth motions you almost want to over exaggerate because otherwise it just looks jumbled.
Aside from basic set up and positioning I pretty much always use the graph editor for the actual animation. I know some people use the motion editor but I love how easy it is to speed up or slow down the speed of a movement with it which helped a lot when making this video.
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