This weeks blog is at a slight tangent from the usual. I woke up at 5am for no apparent reason this morning, so rather than going back to bed or doing something sensible, I decided that i’d have a shot at animating a character with the restriction of getting it finished today as a piece of research.
In the end it took 6 hrs from concept to completion which I’m pretty happy with. I’ve embedded a link below to the “making of” video from YouTube, it’s infact just a series of render tests and previews followed by the final animation rather than me talking or going into any sort of tutorial (which would have required more effort than i’m willing to put in today), but I thought it might be quite cool anyway.
Some more technical notes on how I did it, for those that care:
For the character, I created a mouth object (from a modified poly cylinder) with blend shapes for mouth positions and a deformed sphere for the body with 2 spheres for eyes and a couple of eyelid objects. Rather than building a skelton for the movement I created a lattice deformer over the mesh objects which I then parented to nurbs shapes through clusters. I also wrote some really primitive expressions so that he would “rock” if you moved the lowest of the controllers (the circles around his body). The rotations were incrementally less as you got higher in the character. (“controller1.xRotate = controller2.xRotate / 1.8″ so on and so forth)
The eyes were aim constrained to a locator and the eyelid movement is driven by the rotation of the eyes. I then imported the audio, sync’d the mouth up, then animated the eyes and finally the “rocking” of the body.
The shader for the blob was intended to look like plasticine and has an animated bump map with different variations of finger prints for each frame to give it that “just squashed into shape” feel that you get from some claymation.
Finally the set was dressed with shackles as a homage to “O Brother Where Art Thou” and pencils as a homage to everyone’s favourite lump of clay….”Morph!”
