Face posing

Just messing around with some face posing, going to do a dialogue shot next so I am doing some testing. Here is the first one.

3d turnaround scene test

This is a pretty good representation of what the final render will look like.

War, what?

I'm thinking about doing a war scene with some good realistic human body mechanics.  Here is a test render of one the characters.

Appeal

What is appeal in animation?


       This post isnt very planned, its more of me just going through this in my head struggling to figure this appeal thing out.  So I will apologize for the lack of structure.

    As some of you may know I have been working on creating a new demo reel by the end of this year.  It has been about six weeks and I have created 2 new shots around 13 seconds each.  They can be found Here  and Here  It is now time to start with something new.  I am either going to do a new comedic dialogue, or a pantomime acting/ body mechanics shot. I want this new shot to be very appealing, what does that mean for animation?  Well...

    It is hard to describe it because it is something you feel.  Animation is composed of many things, good posing, silhouette, staging, timing, lighting, and editing to name a few.  I believe that a shot with appeal has all of the above in it working together.  It is this harmony that I believe to create appeal.  It is like a smoothy.  You have many ingredients that work together but if one of the m is missing something doesn't taste right, its hard to put your finger on it but something is not right.

    I think the  best way to figure appeal out is to look at a shot with a lot of appeal, what a revolutionary idea!  So the animation I chose is the opening animation(which Im sure is by design) of Dave Logans Animation reel  here is the link to his reel.Daves reel

    That was just awesome, right? 
    Lets figure out why.

    First off it is a great piece of dialogue, a good dynamic line, with some audio hits that the animator can use to ground the animation.

   There is very clear posing and silhouette.  Examples below.

     As the pictures above show.  the lighting he has create has very intentionally lit the character so that there isn't a very distracting background, and really clears up the silhouette.  White character on black background.

    Look at those mouth and eye shapes.  They are all working together and it is very clear in what the character is thinking and also his attitude is.  It is this clarity that I am striving for every animation.    Another thing, it isn't very long, the whole shot is around ten seconds.  So you dont lose the attention of the audience.

  I can go on forever analyzing this great piece of animation but creating this post has and really breaking down this shot has helped me figure out how important posing is for our animations.  and how much posing effects the appeal

I must get back to work now. 

Lip sync Pass

Here is a lip sync pass brought pretty far.  My mentor Sean Sexton told me about this workflow, animate lips to get mechanics working, then move to the blocking, and start to refine whole animation until polished.  Here is the lip sync

Layouts

Here are 2 different layouts for my shot.
Layout 1
Layout 2
I like the second one more..I think it is a simpler.

Suggestions?

New Dialogue Shot

        So I have been studying a lot of rending techniques for Maya and Mental Ray but I have also been looking for some new dialogue for a new shot I will be working on.  I have posted THIS video which has ten different audio clips that I have chosen to narrow down.  I have chosen number 2.

I have also created the male character using Bishop 2.0
Behold, David!!!