Wednesday
In Nicks class, we continued with our face animations. Our task was to pick a monologue we liked from a film and use the audio to reference the mouth shapes to recreate it with our characters.
I chose Morpheus in the film the Matrix, the scene there we was first explaining what the Matrix was to Neo. I selected that part of the clip and imported it into AfterEffects. After trimming the clip down Nick showed us the the easiest was to import the clip into Maya is to export the footage and the audio separately from AfterEffects.
After importing it into Maya
We then had to animate the jaw to look like a “puppet mouth” and sync this when the actors mouth was opening.
I also decided to change my character to try and make it look more like morpheus using the blend shapes.
To do this i used the sculpting tools.
From there I used the blend shapes again to do a few facial expressions.
Thursday
This is the original Walk Cycle after I put it into Spline. It looked really bizarre because I animated it on the master key.
After changing the animation from linear tangent to auto tangent or Spline. When it changed, the animation was jumping and glitchy so I George showed us how to go into the graph editor and start to adjust and add key frames to make it look better.
First, I adjusted the ball itself. I turned on motion trail and adjusted the arcs to make them smoother
I then went into front view and corrected the motion trail so it looked like a figure of 8.
I used the graph editor to smooth out the curves which therefore smoothed out the movement of the ball.
After I did the ball motion I went on to correct the feet and legs. The feet were moving a bit erratically so I corrected the feet to make the feet look like they were peeling off the floor and toes the last to leave. I used the Foot Break, Foot Roll and the Toe Roll Control to do those corrections
After the feet were corrected, I adjusted the height of the ball to stop the knee popping
Lastly, I copied the first sequence of key frames and which was about half the walk cycle, and pasted them for the last half of the walk cycle.