Assignment #7: Introduction to Facial Expressions

Assigned: Thursday, Feb. 19th, 2009
Due: Thursday, Feb 26th at 1:00pm

Resources:

Face Rig - For use with this assignment.
Script to unlock the Basic Guy face rig.
Video of Gary Faigin describing the disgust expression.
List of Stitches expression assignments and Gary's reference videos.

Part 1: Disgust

This week you will be working on facial expressions. There are six main expressions as defined by Gary Faigin: happy, sad, angry, disgust, surprise, and fear. As a warm-up, we will be working on the disgust expression. You will be using this face rig instead of the Basic Guy for these expressions. Keep in mind that even the slightest details can change how the face is read. Use the mirrors in the lab and yourself as reference. Also remember that the position of the head can change how an expression is read, so feel free to rotate the neck joint.

What to do:

Use the facial rig linked above to create a disgust expression. Render a front, side, and perspective view.

Part 2: Facial Animation

Using the face rig linked above, you will animate two different expressions referenced by your film. Go here to see who is doing what shots and to grab reference. You can also find the reference videos in production4\stitches_production\reference\facial_expression_reference. There are a couple of options to choose from in how you animate: 1) Animate each expression individually. Start from neutral, transition to an expression, and then go back to neutral. You would do this for both expressions. OR 2) Transition between the two expressions in one animation. Start from neutral, transition to the first expression, transition to the second expression, then go back to neutral.

Remember the Richard Williams video you watched in class. The face should have overlapping motion when transitioning expressions, instead of all moving at once (e.g. the mouth, then the eyes, then the eyebrows, etc). Timing is just as important here as it is with body movement, so you will need some reference to study. It would be best if you took a video of yourself going to the extreme for the expression you are assigned.

Motion reviews will be held as usual, so please check the website for your scheduled time. If something is not correct then let one of the TA's know

What to do:

Animate! Choose one of the options above in how to do your animation, but make sure the transition between expressions is appropriate to their context in the film. Please time this out, we are not looking for static or quick poses, this is a practice shot for your film.
Attend your motion reviews as normal and have a version of your transitions ready.

Part 3: Sit Finessing and Facial Expressions

Here you will get a chance to do some final motion tweaking on the sit animation you worked on for the past two weeks. Additionally, we are unlocking the face rig of the Basic Guy so you can experiment with adding facial expressions to completed character motion. Download this script and run it in the scene with your Basic Guy animation to unlock the face controls.

General Animation and Maya Tips:

Your planning sheet should have everything you will need to know. You should, in theory, be able to animate without ever referring back to your reference - just to your planning sheet.
Start with your key poses first! Get those right, then add breakdowns (keys further defining the motion between your keyframes) as you need them.
When working on key poses you will want to key all of the controls on the same frame. If you stagger their keys, figuring out which key goes to which pose will become frustrating later, and in general slow down the workflow.
Make sure keys don't land on partial frames (for example, frame 3.14). If this happens it is usually the result of key scaling. To fix partial framed keys, select all of the problem keys in the timeline, right-click hold on the selection, and choose "Snap".
Try not to spend too much time in the Graph Editor. Focus on what your animation looks like, not what the curves look like. Don't be afraid to add more keys or breakdowns.
Save iterations! You especially want to save an iteration when all of your key poses are set, before moving on to clean up the graph editor and adding inbetweens (basically another word for "breakdowns).

Playblasting:

Playblasts are Maya's way of creating a preview of your animation that runs in real time, and is much faster to create than a render. Go to Window > Playblast > OptionBox. Change the option for Viewer to 'Movieplayer', change the Display size to "Custom" and enter 640 and 480 for the two values. Change the scale to "1.00", and check "Save to File" and name it appropriately.

IMPORT NOTES: The point of playblasts are to get a good preview of your animation. This means that you should hide everything that clutters the screen, and set the camera up to get a good view of your motion (you don't want the camera so far away that your bouncing ball it just a dot!) You will want to hide the heads up display information by going to Display->Heads Up Display and unchecking everything in the list. You will also want to hide all of the animation controls. Since these controls are usually NURBs curves, go to the panel menu and uncheck Show->NURBS Curves.

Turn-in Checklist:

Use .ma and not .mb
Please name your files lastname_firstname_assignmentnumber_partnumber_filename.* (example: doe_john_a1_p2_character_ball.ma)
Part 1: One Maya file.
Part 1: Three images of the disgust expression (front, side, 3/4 view)
Part 2: One or two Maya files.
Part 2: 3-6 playblasts (front, side, 3/4 view)
Part 2: Motion review!
Part 3: One Maya file.
Part 3: One playblast of your final sit motion.