Large strides have been taken this week as far as facial animation. The rough cut below contains the rough draft of Lou’s animation, which I will polish up and improve by the end of this week so I can do final renders over the weekend. Any critiques of the animation are certainly appreciated, especially this [...]

The end approaches, and I’m making good strides to finish on time. Below is a rough block out of the open/close and wide/narrow facial movements of Lou throughout the length of the shot. This week all of the other animation (the stuff that should really bring Lou to life) will be added for a complete [...]

Some nice developments this week, the first of which being that Lou’s rig is complete! To troubleshoot the blend shapes and get some practice in facial animation, I did a rough animation test, seen below. (Note: this little audio gem isn’t in the final cut, but I enjoyed it too much to not use it).

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As we skid into Week 7, the facial rig is nearly complete:

This week I developed nearly 37 blendshapes for Lou’s facial rig. There are still a few more yet to do, and then perhaps some corrective ones depending on troublesome spots in the rig. The main challenge left is to get everything fed into [...]

Let’s start off with a quick update on Lou’s rig.

The joint rig is complete and fully operational! Having it is very helpful in supplying a nice base for each expression I wish to translate into blendshapes, as I can begin to form the face with the rig, duplicate the skin out, and further model [...]

And so another week of production seemingly flies by– both successes and failures to report. Let’s start with some of the successes.

A facial rig is born! The rig itself (including blendshapes, custom controls, and GUI) is still far from complete, but the underlying bone and cluster structure is set and fully operational. My [...]