Summary: did another lip sync exercise, started an animation add-on, saw a quenda
It’s been June 2018! The Blender 2.8 Code Quest has just finished up and it’s been amazing to see all the progress. Also I saw a quenda (southern brown bandicoot) in the local park this month for the first time ever. Here it is!
You can see and share the video on YouTube at higher res here. (If I inline the YouTube video here, it’ll track you.)
I spent the long weekend at the beginning of June completing exercise 4 of CG Cookie’s Demystifying Lip Sync course – two versions of it! At first I wanted to try using pre-posed mouth shapes for speed’s sake. I got this. (The “Melvin” character is from CG Cookie.)
It’s OK but very over-enunciated, the mouth goes too open and seems to rise and fall on the face a lot, etc. I put it down to relying too much on hastily-created pose libraries.
On my next attempt, I did a pass keyframing the gape of the mouth every two frames. The next pass I keyed the width of the mouth on alternating frames to the mouth gape, then the roll/pout of the lips on the same lip keys on the next pass. I used the pose library to hit particularly fiddly shapes and polished problematic timing afterwards. This “poseless” lipsync workflow was nicely rapid and produced good results in much less time. See what you think!
Much better, I think!
Speaking of animation, this month I started coding a animation tools add-on for Blender at the prompting of Looch. So far it has a couple of handy functions and one pretty cool function.
This shows a tool for the graph editor which makes actions more exaggerated or subtle. (animBot users might know this tool as Push/Pull.)
I’m doing time-critical project work at the day job this month and next month. This has meant some long (14+ hour!) work days. I’m making a point of relaxing and taking it easy when I’m at home so I don’t burn out too badly, so that means less animation/coding in my spare time and more sleep.
Next month is looking a little bit less intense than this month though, so hopefully I won’t have to resort to cute animal videos to sweeten the July recap. 🙂
