Character Animation

Below is a quick test of a piece of animation I have done on our second character. Lija rigged him and weight painted and she did a good job with it, especially with the face (shown HERE). We had spoken before that the main aspect of this character was his moustache so it should be able to move in a variety of ways. I enjoyed animating this scene as I could play around with how his moustache could convey his thoughts and emotions. It would have been great to be able to push this further, however due to the fact that Unity can only take bone driven animation, blend shapes weren't an option. It's a shame really because some really interesting facial animation could have been created but I guess that is something to explore in the future.

Even though this character is hardly on show, probably only for about 10 seconds or so I still want him to be a believable character and this is all down to performance. For this I ended up pulling a variety of faces in the mirror to see how his face would deform when he would be on screen, obviously I then had to simplify these down as the facial rig was only very basic for it was going into a game engine. I'm quite happy with how it has turned out so far, I just have to be careful when it comes to animating him further because as he is so blocky and low poly, he can't move as much as Gloria. There are certain parts of him that will just deform when it gets to a certain point, Lija has gone in and locked off and limited certain attributes but I have actually gone back in and taken some of the limitations off. I did this because I felt that I could get a better idea of how far I could push it with the animation before it became deformed. Limiting is always a good habit to get into when create characters as in industry, this is what I would get being an animator - a working character that has been set and locked off. Obviously within industry they have far more complex rigs that work to a higher standard so going back into the attributes and changing things would not be necessary.