I finally have some animation to show. It’s not completely perfect, but I consider it done (enough). But please post both comments and critique anyway!
I’ve been working on/off since the end of last weekend on this. It was mostly meant to be a animation test only, but it kinda developed, so I had great fun adding a bit of DOF, SSS and some compositing nodes to give it more of a finished cinematic look.
But I’d rather call this done now than working on it forever, so it has alot(!) of flaws here and there. I’m especially not satisfied with the lip-sync. Anyway, a little bit of bad animation is better than no animation at all.
It’s from “Napoleon Dynamite”. Great movie if you haven’t seen it.
Anyway, excellent work here. Some of the lip movement could be exaggerated a bit more to make it look less forced. Seems now that there is not enough definition in the actual mouth shapes to make it look more like the sounds that it should be. Hope I made some sense there.
I think it’s on the f sounds that you really need to modify the face shape most. The expressions and that nose wrinkle are spot on. Also lots of charactor in the eye-movements.
All the critique posted is very nice as well! I’ll keep it in mind for my next animation (whenever it’ll be…).
Jeepster: Too big? I hope it was just me who missed some irony there.
I think the file size is fair enough. Of course it could be better, but I didn’t want to fight with video formats all day long. If it really is a problem, I’ll look into making a .mp4.
It’s nice to see you attempting something different for a change Matthias
The general body movements were quite nice, especially the way the head/neck moved at the start.
Also, the lipsync wasn’t too bad, but in a few places, it could have been a little bit more defined (but hey, I think I saw a segment in Finding Nemo a little while ago where the lipsync was actually quite lazy/not synced up at all ) Some of the little quivering motions of the mouth when he’s finding his words is quite effective, but I thought they were a bit too slow.
What bothered me most about this piece was the movement of the eyelids. In a few places, they did a few weird things (there seemed to be flickering or something). Most of the time, it just didn’t feel too convincing.
EDIT: I just watched it again, and noticed the nose twitch. Nice little touch.
Looks really nice! I recognise that from the movie . I found that the lipsync got slightly sloppier as it went on, but overal it was pretty nice! The lighting and overal render especially was fantastic!
