| Sunday,
February 28, 1999 - Animating Cind-E Let me start by reminding you that I'm a producer/programmer! |
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| When I started Above the Garage Productions, I also started doing art. The reasoning was that if I tried to do some art I would understand the REQUIREMENTS and then I could give better direction to real artists. | ||
| The whole idea of doing 'programmer art' was just to understand the process. | ||
| As time went on, I had less and less resources and more and more art to do, so I did more and more myself. | ||
| Now, IMHO, I'm an okay (albeit slow) artist. Not great, but 'good enough' for lots of things. | ||
| For instance, check out this animation (wait for it to load, it's 237K): | ||
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| This is first and (so far) only significant animation I've done in my life! (Not counting flying spaceships which nobody counts as animation anymore.) | ||
| It took forever for but it's not bad. I'd say it's about 75% of what a real pro could do, given the same resources. (Okay, okay, it's not "Episode I" quality, but I'm not spending millions - nay - tens of millions - of dollars either.) | ||
| It's worth pointing out that I animated it the hard way - by pushing clusters of "CV's" around. None of that fancy "interpolating between two poses" stuff. | ||
| It's also worth pointing out that other than starting with a bare Viewpoint Labs polygonal model, I did everything - make up and hair included. | ||
| Well, now it's a couple of years later, and I made a deal with Laura West - she would supply me with a sound bite for Cind-E and I would animate to it. Then I would have a better demo (one with sound) and she would also have a cool demo for her portfolio as well. | ||
| Sadly, I'd forgotten how hard it was to make that original animation! | ||
| Happily, Laura has been very understanding of the whole process. | ||
| This time, I'm using a different process. | ||
| I recently saw some great facial motion capture from Final Fantasy VIII. Wow - great stuff. | ||
| I thought I would get better results if I did a reduced version of that. | ||
| Remember, I have next-to-no resources, so I have to be very clever. | ||
| As you no doubt know, the Disneys and Dreamworks of the world shoot video while they get their audio preformances. That way they have great reference material for their animators. | ||
| Laura performed in a studio in Sacramento (hey, I told you this was a virtual company - physical distance is not a limitation). There was no video camera present. In fact, I hadn't really thought about the mo-cap idea at the time, or else perhaps I would have had the whole thing performed on video tape instead of DAT tape. | ||
| So, I decided to use myself as a reference as a stand-in for Laura. | ||
| Students of animation also know that Disney (and presumably Dreamworks) animators have a mirror sitting by their animation stand so they can look at themselves and figure out the performance. | ||
| (My wife bought me a mirror on a stand a couple of years ago. I wonder what I did with that ...) | ||
| But I couldn't really stomach the idea of watching myself say the line "Splashed Another One" over and over and over and over and ... | ||
| I was at a bit of a loss as to how to proceed. That plus the fact that my old animation didn't work anymore because I had upgraded to Alias 8.2 and something got lost in the translation, so one idea I had - of just hacking on the old animation - wasn't going to work. | ||
| After a bit of thinking (say, about six weeks), I decided to print out the waveform, which is also something Disney animators do, so they can get the timing just right. I figured out through experimentation with Cool Edit 96 which bits of the waveform matched certain parts of the wording. I figured this would give me the exact timing. And it did. | ||
| But it seemed like I was still facing too low-level of a problem. | ||
| Finally I shot myself on video tape for reference. Here it is (305K). | ||
| Oh, here's Laura's original performance (23K). | ||
| Amazingly, when I lined the two up in Adobe Premiere, they sounded really close, although the feel was totally different. The timing was okay. | ||
| (Here's my video reference with Laura's voice.) | ||
| (And here's what the two waveforms look like.) | ||
| Next, I converted the video into an Adobe Premiere "Filmstrip", which is also editable by Photoshop. | ||
| I traced over the lip movements. Here's how that looks (230K). My three year old son calls that the "toothpaste version" because it looks like I outlined my lips in toothpaste. | ||
| It looks pretty funky, eh? That's because I did the entire 30 frame tracing in about four minutes. I was very sloppy. | ||
| Now, here's how it looks with just the outline (43K). | ||
| It actually looks much better, but still fairly cartoony. The amazing thing is that when I show this to people (without showing them the previous stuff) there is no question in their minds but that the lip sync matches up. | ||
| And now - here it is with Laura's voice replacing mine (43K). That's an outline of my video reference and her voice. | ||
| Cool, huh? | ||
| Finally, I fired up Alias and created a NURB circle and animated it using the rough outline as a reference. | ||
| (Supposedly ILM took all that great animation done by Phil Tippet studios using the Dinosaur Input Device (DID) and replaced it all with new stuff. They used the original as reference, since it was still great, but it still suffered [supposedly] from motion-capture artifacts, and the only way to get really smooth interpolated animation was to start over. At least that's the claim [but I believe it or else I wouldn't repeat it].) | ||
| So, here's the Alias animation with Laura's voice (55K). This looks pretty different because the output is from inside of Alias. And technically, Alias doesn't want to render a circle, because mathematically it's nothing but empty space, so I had to trick it into making a rendering using the interactive interface. | ||
| After all that work it's a bit anti-climatic, but it's not bad, really. It's still not what a from-scratch original hand animation would look like. | ||
| I was going to clean it up further, but I decided to keep it in this form for now, because the more you clean up mo-cap the less of the original feel remains. This is a generic problem with mo-cap that is well known to anyone that's tried it. | ||
| So, I'm at the hard point of having to dig out the Alias books and re-figure-out how to hook up animation curves and clusters and sets and all that crap so I can hook this animation curve (or a version of it) to Cind-E's polygonal face. | ||
| I hope it's gonna look good ... |
