PeCap W5 '24: Retargeting in Maya Cont.

Our lecture content this week was about finishing the retargeting process for the brows and eyes, touching briefly on the clean up process and how we will be using the graph editor in the upcoming weeks. As the work was mostly practice based, I didn't make too many notes on the lecture content but paid close attention to what Dr Kennedy considered could be fixable during cleanup vs. retargeting.

One thing Dr Kennedy mentioned before retargeting is to key the 1st frame after the neutral, as there are differences in the beginning pose and the neutral face.

My first retarget pass for the eyebrows was quite inconsistent in terms of timing the raises/drops and random wiggles. I went through and wrote a list of which frames needed some adjustment.

I adjusted the frames in 200 frame intervals to focus on a section at a time in great detail. The first 200 frames was easily fixable except for some jitter which could be cleaned within the graph editor. However, frame 167 to 169 had a massive drop in the right outer brow. It took me ages to figure out how to remove this random drop, but eventually I keyed every frame bar the problem frame, and it finally smoothed out the drop.

I ended up with 29 frames for my first pass of the brows. During this pass I was able to time the raises and drops a lot better, but there was a lot of jitter when she raises one eyebrow without the other. There's a lot of jitter in the last 500 frames too, but I've tried adding more keys to no aval it seems, so it might be easier to edit in the graph editor. The last thing I did before class was work on the eye frames.

I got some feedback from Dr Kennedy in class about the week 4 homework (creating the poses for the brows and eyes). He had some really good tips I could use to make my poses a closer match to the video footage. This meant I had to go back and edit in the changes.

• You can square off the brows using the 'brown down' controls and raising the 'brow raise outer' controls.

• Turning on the viewport grid makes it easier to analyse the footage.

• Use the neutral frame as your frame of reference, comparing the overall appearance between the frame your working on and the neutral to see how much things have changed.

• Delete frame 63 on the brows as it pretty much matches frame 141

• Use the graph editor to adjust the keys in small increments.

Also, someone in class mentioned that we need to assign the correct face group params to the brows, eyes and mouth in the character setup so that only the specific data for each specific face group is being read rather than the whole head.

With these tweaks made obvious to me, I decided to go back through the brows retargeting and refine the key poses even further. Much to my amazement, I think the correctly assigned face groups actually improved the consistency of the eyebrows a lot.

When I was happy, I moved onto the eyes.

Because I had changed the face group setup in the character setup, I found that when I retargeted with only a few key poses, it actually came out really clean. I was surprised by the initial accuracy after my experience with the brows. There are a few tweaks that could be made but overall I was much more satisfied with how clean it was compared to when I didn't have the eyes data connected in the character setup.

For example, some changes include:

eyes opening and need to move left on frame 60

eyes dart right on frame 156, quickly

eyelids and eyes need to drop more on frame 217

eyes straight frame 401

adding in the natural eyeball jitter from frame 530 onwards

But for now, here is a video of where I am up to: