He's So Sad

The big trick for this 3-week assignment was to swap out Bishop's head with the more advanced one with all the facial controls. Luckily, the school gave us a Melscript that automated the process. (Big kudos to Taylor Mahoney who also made us a whole Maya shelf of useful tools). Unfortunately, the keyframes for the eyes weren't carried over. At first I was a little worried because my shot had a lot of eye movement, brows and lids doing all kinds of things. I was concerned I might not get through my first pass for the entire shot. Luckily, throwing the keys in there went smoother than I thought and I had plenty of time to spend on it as well. I also came up with process that seemed to flow well.

I decided the eyes in this shot are higher priority than the mouth, so I started there using a "layered" approach. After a couple of lame-o starts, I scrubbed through the original Quicktime movie and put Bishop's eye moves and blinks back in. On a second runthrough I went back and keyed the brows. As I worked I saw some places I wanted to make tweaks to the original, so I put those in as well. Finally, I made another pass putting in most of the phonemes and other mouth shapes. Doing the mouth and brows was made a bit simpler because our Maya Shelf has tools that give us a bunch of presets as a starting point. This was a big help because I was able to quickly try different brow or mouth positions to see what I thought worked best, then just make adjustments as needed. For example, there was no preset for "ER" and besides, it was coming out of a "W" and going into an "S" mouth shape ("worse") , so I fudged one of the presets.

I was trying to work as fast as I could so I employed a technique I'd discovered while doing the two "Jeff Kim 3-Hour Animation Showdowns" I'd done; instead of blocking with "stepped" keys, I cut to the chase and keyed everything with "flat" tangents. I found this to be a more "straight-ahead" approach, though; it worked great for the this because I already knew where my keyes were going to be and what they'd be doing. It's almost like blocking and refining in one step, but I don't think this will work for everything. I'll use it where I can but probably continue to block in stepped for most everything else until I'm really good. I didn't check my file timestamps but I probably spent about 8-12 hours on the shot this week in 2 long sessions (including breaks). Not super fast but ok for now. I was able deliver the shot early Sunday rather than rushing at the last minute.

Though it's clearly not done, it seemed to have come out decent so far. Ike liked it. He even applauded that I'd unified the brow movements with the eyes on my blinks (though I didn't unify eyes/lids/brow in all the places it's necessary). In tonight's Q&A I want to ask Ike how to handle the "lazy eye" that happens because to get the left eye (screen right) to look good at frame 88-ish, I have to point it separately from the other eye and then realign it by 92. There are quite a few other things to fix, too and I'm relieved I had the right amount of time to get it as far as I did. Here's what I turned in Sunday...

kr_401_31_16.mov (QT Sorensen, 4.8MB)

Doesn't Bishop look sad at the end?