Facial Animation
Jaden McGrath 11/16/18
When designing a character, it's one thing to draw the character out, give them detail, or even animate parts like their head, neck, arms or legs. But if you really want to add something detailed or special to the character, then facial animation and lip sync can be very useful. The expressions on a character's face can reveal to the viewer what the character is feeling whether they're sad, happy, scared, angry, etc. They could react to either a physical thing or even a mental/emotional thing like something blowing up in front of them or feeling a sudden feeling of happiness or love. This could be accomplished with simple rigs and very specific character design because presentation and timing is key to facial expressions. Combining subtlety and clarity could lead to a very successful performance of your character.
The brain runs on input and output just like a computer does. Input is anything can affect one of more of a character's five senses. Those five senses are of course sight, sound, taste, touch, and and smell. And using those five senses can help with your animated character like maybe they react to a bad smell, a cold touch, a happy sight, a painful sound, or a good taste. When you are deciding on what expression you want to give a character, a good method to use would be the KISS method which is to keep it simple. To answer things like what's happening in the shot or how does your character feel about this, etc. To decide which expression to use, just make the character's head, imagine how that character is feeling, and then act that expression out yourself. Some expressions even include two emotions like being neutral is a combination of happy and sad, creating a very neutral face.
Facial poses or expressions can be made a lot like other body parts like arms and legs. Like maybe add line of action for between the eyebrows, down the nose, through both the top and bottom lip, and right to the center of the chin. The can be broken, but it's a great way to get someone started. Facial expressions can even use some principals of animation like squash and stretch, anticipation, and appeal. You can use squash and stretch when you want to make your character's expressions more exaggerated, you can use anticipation to give your expressions more of a fluent and realistic edge, and you should definitely use appeal to make your character and their expressions more interesting and nice to look at.
I really got a kick out of this article because I always found the topic of working with the faces of a character to be really interesting. It was one of the major things I wanted to learn in my animation class next to actually making a whole character move. In fact, that's why I'm really excited to keep working on these lip sync projects and why I'm loving doing them so much. This article made me learn that the five senses are actually important to use when doing a character's expressions and that it is beneficial to act out the expressions yourself before deciding if it works. That is something I will definitely keep in mind going forward.
Like always, I don't really have many questions. I guess I only have one and that would be, "What part of the face is the most difficult to make express?" And also like always, I do not disagree with this article in the slightest. In fact, it's actually helped me figure out how to make my lip sync project even better. This is a very important thing to know when it comes to animation because without this, your character's facial movements would look bland and kind of mediocre. When designing a character's face, you definitely should include facial expressions to it to make your character's face all that much better.
When designing a character, it's one thing to draw the character out, give them detail, or even animate parts like their head, neck, arms or legs. But if you really want to add something detailed or special to the character, then facial animation and lip sync can be very useful. The expressions on a character's face can reveal to the viewer what the character is feeling whether they're sad, happy, scared, angry, etc. They could react to either a physical thing or even a mental/emotional thing like something blowing up in front of them or feeling a sudden feeling of happiness or love. This could be accomplished with simple rigs and very specific character design because presentation and timing is key to facial expressions. Combining subtlety and clarity could lead to a very successful performance of your character.
The brain runs on input and output just like a computer does. Input is anything can affect one of more of a character's five senses. Those five senses are of course sight, sound, taste, touch, and and smell. And using those five senses can help with your animated character like maybe they react to a bad smell, a cold touch, a happy sight, a painful sound, or a good taste. When you are deciding on what expression you want to give a character, a good method to use would be the KISS method which is to keep it simple. To answer things like what's happening in the shot or how does your character feel about this, etc. To decide which expression to use, just make the character's head, imagine how that character is feeling, and then act that expression out yourself. Some expressions even include two emotions like being neutral is a combination of happy and sad, creating a very neutral face.
Facial poses or expressions can be made a lot like other body parts like arms and legs. Like maybe add line of action for between the eyebrows, down the nose, through both the top and bottom lip, and right to the center of the chin. The can be broken, but it's a great way to get someone started. Facial expressions can even use some principals of animation like squash and stretch, anticipation, and appeal. You can use squash and stretch when you want to make your character's expressions more exaggerated, you can use anticipation to give your expressions more of a fluent and realistic edge, and you should definitely use appeal to make your character and their expressions more interesting and nice to look at.
I really got a kick out of this article because I always found the topic of working with the faces of a character to be really interesting. It was one of the major things I wanted to learn in my animation class next to actually making a whole character move. In fact, that's why I'm really excited to keep working on these lip sync projects and why I'm loving doing them so much. This article made me learn that the five senses are actually important to use when doing a character's expressions and that it is beneficial to act out the expressions yourself before deciding if it works. That is something I will definitely keep in mind going forward.
Like always, I don't really have many questions. I guess I only have one and that would be, "What part of the face is the most difficult to make express?" And also like always, I do not disagree with this article in the slightest. In fact, it's actually helped me figure out how to make my lip sync project even better. This is a very important thing to know when it comes to animation because without this, your character's facial movements would look bland and kind of mediocre. When designing a character's face, you definitely should include facial expressions to it to make your character's face all that much better.
Wow that's a BIG MOOD in the "not many questions" and the "not disagreeing" section! BIG MOOD!
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