Today, I read the current notes for my Bodacious Creed head playblast from my Head Sculpture & Facial Expressions instructor, Cynthia Rangel. (Very good instructor, by the way.) She suggested a few changes, and they were pretty easy to do. One reason they were so easy was that she taught us about the Graph Editor in Maya, which shows a graph of the changes in an animation, and makes it very easy to change the extremity of a pose, such as an open mouth, and to move keyframes around to fix timing.
So, I got those fixed, and today I'll be rendering the animation. Each frame takes a good two or three minutes, so this is going to take all day, at least! Anyway, I'll share it in the vlog when it's done. As I type this, I'm doing a test render to make sure the frames are going to look as I want them to. It's looking pretty good!
Unrelated to the thesis, I've also made progress on the Zombie Janet animation for Couch Zombies. As today, I'll be rendering the Creed animation, I probably won't have time to work on Z Jan's, but so far, I've animated her head tilts, eyes, eyebrows, and eye lids, and am about half way through the jaw. I'm even opening her mouth slightly when I hear a breath for more realism.
Janet had some comments on the shape of the head the other day, and I didn't think I could accommodate the fixes, as far as I was into the animation. But, I figured out what to do! I just had to create a new blend shape with more exaggerated zombie features. I then deleted all the blend shape connections from the head, reapplies them all with the new one, reconnected them to the animation control, and was able to morph her head to the new look while still having all the facial controls. Sounds like a lot of work, and it was, but not nearly as much as if I had to redo all the blend shapes.
Okay, back to rendering this animation. The still frame looks good!
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