Now in this recent shot as with the last, my aim was to understand how to animate facial expressions which i struggled with in the last video been the first time i'll give it a shot. Even if i'd done some research and all that, i couldnt nail it until about after half the anime had gone. So what did i do? I let it go and quickly animated another which i finished coupling yesterday and uploaded on YouTube which is the first link that's posted here.
My Experience so far has been tremendous and i've found that facial animation is actually easier and more fun to animate than other parts of the body. If you have the appropriate morph target for a mood that you want to animate, it makes it all the more fun and you can actually see this characters come to live in this way. Think about it, animating the eye balls alone makes a beautiful difference in the animation of a character as you see this change not to talk of adding facial expressions. The method employed was the use of Blend shapes.
Blend Shapes are basic shapes you create in your software and in mine they are there by default, all you have to do is give it a length and width if it's a rectangle or radius if it has to do with curvy shapes like circles and ellipses, with each shape set to drive or using the technical term for it in 3dsmax "wired" to control the morph targets you've created earlier. The process is not as simple as i say it but if you know how to wire things in 3dsmax then you'll begin to understand what i'm talking about. Maybe i'll find some time to talk about how to create blend shapes in another edition. So all the shapes are created and are linked to a parent shape that houses all the other smaller shapes. They are frozen so that they can always come back to the frozen point zero no matter where they have been moved to i.e "transform to zero". Thereafter you go to the hierarchy tab and lock the rotations, scale and Z positions or as you may want it to serve you. then you wire the axis of the shape you want to control to the morph target. Anyways like i said, i'ld make out time for that in the future.
Finally, this recent shot was created using the CAT rig as opposed to the later that was rigged in bones. The bones obviously is more flexible and accommodates alot of things. As a matter of fact, Your restrictions it's capabilities will depend on how good you are with rigging. But there are some advantages too with the CAT in that you can quickly save a hand pose or any body part and re-use by just double clicking its preset manager or in the case of the body parts right clicking on the body part to either save or load animations and poses.I try to keep whatever it is as simple as i can but improve on the animations, still it's a lot of work animating, setting the scene and ultimately rendering. So i'm looking for an easy way out of this. The rendering is as simple as it can get as it is and yeah, it's still a big deal trying to keep with the pace of everything. Well when i find an easier way, i'll inform ya'll.
