AnimationRigs.com contest (May 2012)

A contest entry in which I animated the characters and created the environment.

Lessons learned

1. When thinking of ideas, plot out the entire creation process

            This animation contest provided the character rigs and a dialogue clip, but I felt the need to further develop the scene with an environment to help set up a dialogue piece that happens quite quickly. My favorite ideas centered on a moving mustache which I thought wouldn’t be much of a problem considering I’ve rigged things before. The problem I ran into was making “stretchy bones”. I’d never done a stretch rig before and one day of research would have let me know if I could execute this idea in the time limit along with modeling the set and animating an 8+ second shot. I ended up with a passable result that took longer than necessary.

2. The facial pass

When working on a scene a facial pass doesn’t come until later, depending on the scene of course. It’s important to get the emotion across in body language. However, the volume of face controls in a rig can sometimes rival the controls of the entire body. With so much complexity and subtlety in the face, I would like to devote more time to this pass in the future. Working with rigs that have “simplified” facial controls can be an interesting challenge in itself as well.

3. Using “largest” controller

            An example from Kenny Roy- when you think of a laugh, it generates from the face. The mouth opens and a laugh comes out. A visually effective laugh is not a person with a mouth that is opening and closing, but one that has an open mouth and a whole body that reacts to each chortle. Therefore, communicate an emotion using the largest controller to provide a more convincing performance.

Things that went right

1. Lip-sync

            Lip-sync was not the focus on my recent shots and I was a bit out of practice. Luckily Stop Staring came to the rescue and helped develop a workflow that produced accurate results very quickly.

2. General refresher

            It had been quite some time since I had done any type of modeling or rigging and I used this chance to reacquaint myself with the workflows. I had a great time modeling all the different set pieces and if I continue to practice my focus will be on creating more polygon efficient models.

Credits: 

Character rigs provided by AnimationRigs
Mustache rig made by me.