Lip syncing

So something went awfully wrong with my new model, creating blend shapes before you bind the skin does not work it turns out...well it didn't for me anyway. Note to self I need to really research into something before trying it out, but I guess in a way, making mistakes is how you learn. I ended up trying to rig the face of my character and created quite a few controls to do this. It seemed to be working fine and I was quite pleased with how it was going, however the problem that arose was when I was trying to weight paint the rest of the body. When I rotated the head I couldn't get the influence right and so the geometry became quite distorted. This may have been caused by the extra joints and weight painting I did on the face but I'm not sure. Either way I will look into this further when I return to uni as this is something I will want to do at some point in the year.


Anyway after that disaster I decided to try out some lip syncing as this was the direction I wanted to head down with my model if it had worked out. I used a pre-made rig, the Eleven Rig. I used this within my PPP presentation so I knew the controls and didn't have to learn a whole new rig all over again. I got a piece of dialogue, in this case a scene from Finding Nemo and acted it out whilst recording myself. This would give me a basis to work off and the timings I could animate to. Reference is always a key thing so I need to get into the habit of recording myself acting out the scene whenever I can for future animations. This isn't the whole audio clip I have just been working through a little bit at a time. For my first try it's okay but there still is a lot more work that can be done to improve it. The animation curves within the graph editor I know I need to develop a better understanding of, this will improve my animation making it more realistic and believable.