Chapter 9 - Bounce Back

I mentioned that i missed exploring the facial expression on my previous post. This was definitely my main struggle this week. So this is what happened. Up until this point, i feel that i'm starting to understand the concept of key efficiency ('we want least amount of key for the most amount of information') and we should have control over our keys. This week i felt that i lost control over the keys. Earlier this term, I feel that i have a complete control of Stewie. Obviously because Stewie does not have full facial control. It is of course a whole another different story with Bishop :) I freaked out when i saw the facial controllers hahah! I lost control over the keys :p As I carry on i realised that I am too focused on having 'efficient' keys. Right now, i think it is more important to gain control over them. I would say that it does not matter if we have keys on every frame as long as we know what they are doing. We could always clean them up later on, no? :3

The solution for my issue was by creating character sets. I hardly use this tool because i find it a bit too complicated and somehow i always failed to create a character set. It may sound silly, i have no clue why that happened.. BUT! The most important thing is that i managed to create one, in fact More than one character set Properly heehee.. Thanks to the demo on our lecture :)

I would recommend to try out to make character sets for the jaw-cheek-mouth-nose, eyes and eyebrows. In my opinion character set makes everything look more organised. I feel that I can focus on those particular facial parts because i can only see their keys. The only flaw that i found is if we forgot to turn off the character set once we're done with it. Character set will auto key the controllers that are in the set.. (-o-;) so if we modified the other controller that is not part of the set, eg: if we have facial character set and then we modified the spine, a new key will be set on the facial controls as well. The worst case is if we did copy pairs method and then we still have, for example, eyebrows character set On. We most likely will lose the change that we've done on the eyebrows for the next few frames, because we did not realise that we still have the character set on. This happened to me... :'( i guess we have to be careful and keep reminding our self to turn off the tool before we start tweaking other controllers. I also recommend to make quick selections for the facial controls or use the GUI picker as this will help us to work faster, however, the bottom line is use anything that suits your workflow :)

Back to my shot progression which i would say went very slowly.. here are some of the playblasts, ooh and i splined my shot too *gulp! :

Added some in between keys on the arms to reduce the rigid feels :

Splined! :

I delete the keys on the eyebrows and eyes for some reasons :| i did not remember why i did it ... but i think i imported it back using animtransfer :|

I would say that as the time goes by, i start to feel less frightened by spline mode.. i guess this is a good thing :O

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