Joe Slick

[ross_coe]

Hey folks

Thought I'd post this wee animation done for uni class.
the brief was to create a 15-30 sec animation in which a character steps up to and opens a box, gets a surprise from the contents and says about 3 words of dialogue...but i went for 2 mins with lots of dialogue :p the environment is a photo of my living room that was textured onto matching geometry using brazil utility with shadow/light falloff maps (good to avoid picking up the colour from the lights in the scene).
dont expect much of a plot btw- its pretty basic :p

crits about the animation would be totally appreciated - i think the walk might be a bit crappy (more exaggeration needed I think) and I probably shoulda spent a day cleaning up the keyframes and curves but didnt really have time :p

it's here (divx 7mb....sorry bout the size):
http://members.lycos.co.uk/ross3d/joe_slick.avi

enjoy :)
cheers all

ps: my accent is NOT like that....lol. roight! :p

[ross_coe]

thought while i was here i'd mention a bit bout the rigging as well.

i added custom attributes for the hand controls to adjust the opening and closing of the fingers, as well as an attribute that would let him hold the guitar (using 3 helpers and position contraints).
the head controller had custiom attributes to adjust the opening and closing of the jaw.
feet had the usual attributes to control toe rotation and roll.

i also added motion capture float controllers to certain parts of the morpher modifier for the face - blinking, smile, frown, etc etc.
this way i could use the space bar to record the blinking in real time, and the horizontal motion of the mouse to recordl different expressions.
oviously it wasnt a good idea to do the same for his speech as it wouldnt have given very accurate lip sync - but for adding a bit of a smile or a frown it was quite good :)

and excuse the dodgy tshirt - took me hours and hours of trial and error using reactor to just get it to NOT pass thru his body....was all a bit hit n miss :p