#facial animation

[radladrobin]

From the animation principles workshop. Theme of "a movement and a reaction"

Reaction as gif:

Ik it's crunchy but pencil2d is just like that yk

[animation-course-ahmedabad]

What is Computer Facial Animation?

​Computer Facial Animation

This animation is primarily an area of computer graphics which encloses methods and techniques for generating and animating images.

The importance of human faces in verbal and non-verbal communication and advances in computer graphics hardware and software has caused considerable scientific, technological, and artistic interests in computer facial animation.

In this post we will explore here that What is Computer Facial Animation & Whats the methods and techniques for generating and animating images.

[radladrobin]

First attempt at facial animation!

Pretty happy with it

[edgycrab]

Estella Facial animation.

This is my final animation for this module. I have felt that during this process I have learnt a lot about how I would go about the process of making and animating characters in the future.

To begin with I started animating body. Allowing me to focus on the movements. I believe that the later half of the animation in this respect especially was much smoother, with the first half having multiple jittery and slow movements. With more time, I would have fixed these, and brought the entire animation up to standard. I also believe some of the movements were a bit too exagurated, confusing the animation somewhat.

Second I focused on the lip sinking. This was a challange due to having unlabelled assets, and no clue as to exactly which mouth positions I had. While I eventually figured out where each mouth I needed was in the set, it does mean the movements are significantly more fluid by the end.

Lastly I focused on the eyes and I eyebrows. I tried to make them move around a lot during the animation. With the character being jovial at the beginning, before her eyebrows lower towards the end, giving her a slightly more annoyed appearance. Next time, I would like to make more eye shapes and eyebrows available, maybe even seperating them into their own objects.

Overall I am proud of this animation. While many elements could be improved upon, I believe this to be an adaquet show of the skills and techniques I have learned during this module, and am excited to use them in the future.

[edgycrab]

Rigging

The majority of the body is rigged using a basic skeleton, with certain parts having used weights to minimise the amount distortion in areas where it wasn’t wanted.

The difference comes in how I chose to handle the face. Since I needed parts of the face to move indipendantly of the skeleton, I decided to instead parent all aspects of the face to the skeleton, allowing for the inner eyes and eyebrows to move indipendantly during animation. It also allowed me to edit the sizes of certain elements when needed.

I decided to do this to the whole face due to the amount of distortion it was recieving when the arms moved. Given more time, I would have utilised this more to my advantage, moving more elements of the face, such as the ears.

I would also in the future like to attempt using parenting as an alternative to binding on another primitive based model. My thought is that, that way I would no longer have to deal with undesired distortion, as well as retain the charm of primitive objects.

[edgycrab]

textures and the face

After doing a basic UV of the model, which proved to be easier due to the use of less polygons. I moved swiftly into the texturing stage.

I used my regular style of drawing the textures by hand in a drawing program, making them appear more painted than other textures. The style of the head and body do not quite match and this is due in major part to a switch of programs between the two elements, which lead to me not having the same brushes.

The sides of the mode suffer from stretched textures due to being UVed with the back of the model. In a second attempt I would resolve this issue by UVing them seperately.

The sides of the arms are also uneven due to me attempting to use lineart on them, to pore effect. Next time I will forgo this.

The face is made up of several elements. Due to time constraints I chose to limit the shape of the eyes for the animation. Instead seperating it into multiple assets. The eyes, the inner eye, and the eyebrows. In the hope that they would move seperately.

If I had more time, I would have also drawn the sclera. But I was already unsure as to how this would go in the rigging stage. So I refrained this time.

The mouth is similarly made of numerous images that are placed in the same area. I animated the visibility so that the mouths would switch depending on which one was needed. There wer issues caused by my descision not to label the planes, as in the process of animating, it was hard to find the appropriate ones for a given mouth movement, causing some moments to look slightly odd.

I also noted too late that I had the facial features too far from the face, causing them to look strange when the model turned it’s head. This could have easily been aleviated by editing both the positions and angles of the features.

[edgycrab]

the body

The body was made using a selection of primitives that I edited to roughly emulate the human form. I decided to forgo using quadraw, instead combining the seperate objects into one.

I find it hard hard to note if there were any significant reprecutions to this move, as the model worked well enough, with only the armpits having major deformation issues, due to me not weighing them properly in the rigging stage.

I would like to see how I could go with this more primitive style of model making, as the effect seemed to pay off nicely in this model.

[edgycrab]

Creating the head

My first issues when making the model, was the texture type to use in order to get the right effect from my character. Most types ended up having strange visual glitches in the viewport. While I eventually settled on surface shader for the head. I would later use Standard surface instead for other parts of the model.

It was also hard to properly line up the planes of the model, in part due to the inacuracies of the viewport, and else due to suface shader making the transparent parts of the image appear as white, blocking some elements from view.

On a second attempt I would just go straight to standard surface, as it seemed to have a lot less layering issues in the viewport.