PeCap W11 '24: Foot Roll, Hand Animation, Lip Balm

My second-to-last week staring intently at Miri's funky limbs and neon hair. The focus for the week was on adding in the foot roll that I overlooked last week, animating the finger movements, removing mesh interpenetration, importing the face animation and animating the rage inducing lip balm.

The very first thing I did was adding the reference video into the scene. I created a polyplane, scaled it accordingly and applied a material with the image sequence I exported last week.

Then I could use the reference footage to apply the foot roll. I finally worked out how to use the animation layers but ended up with a combination of base animation changes and animation layer keyframes to add the foot roll.

Before adding foot roll:

After adding foot roll:

A video of my foot roll completed:

Next on the to-do list was adjusting the arms and shoulders. Luckily a lot of my data seemed to be accurate already. There were however, some moments where the fingers went inside the mesh of Miri's thigh. I added another animation layer for the arms and made some minor adjustments so that her hand remained clear of any interpenetration with her body.

Before:

After:

Time for the part I was dreading. The hands. Much to my delight, the left hand was a lot easier to animate than I expected.

Something that I learnt in our lectures that I hadn't thought about was that as the hand closes, the pinky curls the most while the middle finger curves the least. I tried to keep this in mind as I animated the fingers.

Another useful piece of advice was to avoid keeping the fingers static at any times. There needs to subtle flexes and releases which make the performance appear realistic.

The imported reference video was really handy at this time. In saying this, I did have to refer to the second reference video during the moments where her hand was hidden behind her body.

Here is a video where just the left hand has been animated:

Finally, the hand with the lip balm. The evil lip balm. I decided to import my face animation into the scene using ATOM import/export so that I could line up the lip balm correctly.

Not only was the lip balm difficult to get in the right position but it also had some unusual jitter that I believe was a result of the parent constraint somehow. There were times where I didn't move the finger joint or the lip balm and yet it began flickering. I ended up working frame by excrutiating frame to maintain the position of the lip balm.

It was also incredibly tough to keep the lip balm on the lip since the motion in the rest of the arm constantly affected the position of the wrist.

I ended up doing the same thing as with the feet where I used an animation layer whilst simultaneously adjusting the base animation as I went along. This caused some terrible looking curves in the graph editor, but it didn't appear to affect the overall appearance of the arm in the scene.

I think getting the position of the lip balm was more important because otherwise her lips were puckering for no reason.

As I was working primarily from the FaceCam view, I thankfully noticed early on that there were times where the lip balm appeared in the right position in the FaceCam but wasn't actually touching the lip as it should have been. For this reason I ended up with both the perspective view and the FaceCam open, swapping between the two to analyse that both views were similar to their respective references.

It was really cool seeing the face animation on the body. I think it was the first time that I felt that I had now created a replica of human performance in a digital space.

Here is a video of the performance in its current state. As you can see the lip balm is super shaky in parts so it is still in need of some careful tweaks and refinement.

Now that I have everything together in the scene, the only things left to do are:

• Refine the face animation based on the feedback Dr Kennedy gave me from our Formative hand in.

• Try to refine the lip balm movement as much as possible.

• Playblast the performance and hand in the assignment.

I think Miri's face is going to become a nostalgic memory in the future considering how long I have spent analysing this performance.