Week_09: Phonemes and performance

Research:

Facial animation can be one of the most important parts of 3D animation. Unlike body performance, facial animation focus more on details and emotions rather than body mechanics. How to accurately express character’s emotional feelings and match the shape of mouth with lines are facial animation’s targets.

Facial expressions:

To create organic facial expressions, one of the most important things is to keep all parts of face moving. Sometimes animaters just focus on animating one part of character’s face when they are making facial animations. However, each part of character’s face should affect each other. For example, character’s eyebrows, nose and ears should also move when it’s mouth moving.

Another important thing is paying attention to the shapes, especially the shapes of mouth and eyebrows. Good shapes can clearly express the feeling of characters.

Some other techniques are also useful. For example, exaggeration, squash and stretch, etc.

Reading Lines:

Animating lines is also an important part of facial performance.

There are two ways to animate lines:

• Animate by layers (step by step): starting with jaw, then the corner of mouth, then the open or close of lips, then tongue and teeth, then other parts of face.
• Animate by parts (finish the whole shape and then turn to another one).

Some tips on animating lines:

1. Analysis the dialogue before animating. Breakdown the line, trying to find the most apparent changes of mouth shape. For example, the shape of sound “Oh” or “Ah”
2. Do not breakdown the line by “words” (For example, A, O, I), focus on the “sound”.
3. Don’t make mouth moving crazy. Do not simply make every shape of sound and then connect them together, mouth is lazy when people talking. Find the transtions between each words and animate them naturally.

Challenge 10: Phonemes & Performance (Lip Syncing & Facial Animation)

Part 01: Find audio clip

To make the lip syncing and facial animation, I recorded the audio clip of a line from game The Last of Us. The audio and acting performance in this game is great, which can be a good reference for practice.

Here is the audio reference:

Below is the original performance, great facial animation (Naughty Dog does all facial animation by hand)

Part 02: Audio clip breakdown

I tried to breakdown the line and analyse it before I make the animation, which can help me to find out what result I want in this animation.

The line is:

Do you even realize what your life means? Huh? Running off like that. Putting yourself at risk… it’s pretty goddamn stupid.

I listen the audio clip for several times and stratify the emotional statement of this character:

Part 03: Jaw animation

I firstly add the Jaw Bounce animation to build up the framework for this animation, which can help me to get the rhythm of it.

Jaw_animation:

Part 04: Animate mouth shape

After that, I spend more time to animate the shape of character’s mouth to strengthen the emotion of him. When the character speaks angrily, his mouth should move more obviously.

Part 05: Animate nose & tongue & teeth

Then I add some details to my facial animation. For example, add tongue actions, teeth animations and nose animations. This part of animation can make the whole mouth animation look more natural.

Part 06: Animate eyebrows and eyeballs

After jaw and mouth are animated, I start to focus on eyebrows. From the audio clip we can realize that the speaking person is quite angry. Therefore, eyebrows animation should demonstrate this mental statement.

I record an acting video by myself based on the audio reference.

Bad performance actrually,

Anyway, it is still quite useful as a reference.

By using this visual reference, I add more details to character’s eyybrows and mouth. Then I animate some small movements to the eyeballs to make the character more realistic.

Part 07: Animate eye blink and adjustment

Then I add eyes blink to make the character looks more natural. Setting blink attribute to 0.7 can get a good result. However, it seems that the character’s eyeballs and his eyelids clips when the character is blinking. In order to fix that problem, I use the crash correction attribute on eye_head control to adjust the radius of eyeball.

Here is the final result of facial animation:

I also animate the upper body of this character to make the animation more interesting.

Version_01 (still need to be polished):

Recent problems: I think the second half of the mouth animation still has some problem. The jaw animation, which is the fundamental of this animation, is still need to be adjusted. As Alan said in his recordings, jaw animation is really important, which is the guidance of the whole animation. I will check my animation this week and spend more time to practise making jaw animation in the following weeks.

Update01 (09/12/2021):

I add the final part of the animation and adjust a little of the mouth animation. Here is the Version02 video:

Version02: