Month: December 2022

This is my final output for the face modelling exercise. overall I’m very happy with my progress. While I can clearly improve, mostly with shifting weight around the face as a person speaks. I think for my first attempt at facial animation, especially with my own rigged and modeled face, it has come out quite well. I attempted to match the lighting of the original scene by using Maya’s lighting tools to match what I assumed to be the light set up.

As he’s fully lit all around with only minimal shadows in the original scene I assumed a three point lighting system was implemented with fairly bright key, back and fill lights so his face is fully lit up. The light was soft as well so I made sure it was widely dispersed.

Alongside this to create the texture for his eyeball being rolled into the back of his head as I retextured the older eye ball texture that we had and split the UVs from the back of the model to the back of the eyeball creating the a fully rounded eyeball with a blank back rather than a duplicate of the front side.

Lastly I modeled his gums and added a tongue though neither of those can be seen in the render as the original actor really doesn’t show much of any, his face movements are subtle.

Overall the thing I struggled with the most during this was properly animating the face and creating all the blend shapes necessary to make it fully work. Maya gave me some issues itself as its UI isn’t all the easy to read when it comes to knowing what exactly you’re shifting at a given point alongside visual glitches.

This week we came to try out hand at animating the faces we had constructed over the last few weeks. We were told to get a short clip and I took one from Dune. Specifically from 1:17-1:21 when Thufir gives an estimate of how much the space travel costs them.

Learning to use the animation tools alongside the blend shapes to create the mouth shapes was pretty difficult. The biggest issue was with Maya itself as it often would shift the heat, not display my changes or would show a different key frame after adjustments were made. This made working on these blend shapes very difficult as I would constantly have to stop to correct Maya.

While the mouth movements have gotten quite far along I will have to go back to add movement to other key areas of the face like the cheeks to add more realism to the animations. Skin is attached to the entire face so when one part shifts so does all the immediate areas especially around the cheeks.

Overall my biggest challenges this week were handling Maya’s unique issues and keeping track of what blend shapes I was editing and which keyframes were being adjusted.