Week 12

    This week, I completed the blocking phase of my facial expression test. She’s a flirty girl, so I had lots of fun shaping her mouth into different kinds of smiles, all implying different emotions. My favorite facial expression was the ending pose where I rotated the bottom lip in, tightened the lip corners, and played around with the skin clusters to make a really cute and shy biting-the-bottom-lip smile. I also had fun making her eyes flutter. In a way, it felt similar to sculpting when I would manipulate the skin clusters. I had to think about how the cheeks push up and appear rounder as we smile and elongate and appear more angular as we widen our mouth. I think I’ll move on because I feel more comfortable animating face expressions now, which was my goal.

    For the metahuman motion capture scene, I was able to retarget and export the rest of the motion capture actions that I’ll be using. I also found a basketball park scene that fit everything that I needed for my shots. I set up the basketball park environment into my scene with a sky dome as well. Unfortunately, I’m still troubleshooting some issues with getting the mocap data in, but once that is over, I will animate the ball bounces and then do the face tracking.

    I will finally wrap up the entire semester with another simple block out of my original plan. I believe I bit off more than I can chew this semester, which is a common thing for me, but I’m learning more and more about my own strengths and weaknesses. I hope to make a workflow for myself that helps me animate any kind of scene I’m given in the future.


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