animation

I started my character animation from face.

To animate the face I decided to use ‘Morpher’. Morpher is not as easy to use as many people think. The problem to do with morpher can appear when an object (in this case character) has many channels and they are to be used with morpher option.

Floyd has seven basic morpher positions


Each face of a model has a different purpose. My models have different lips so that they could imitate ‘u’, ‘a&i’, ‘e’, ‘o’ and others. There was also a model with closed eyes, smile, with opened mouth and so on. Having all the models completed I was ready to animate the face.
It was very important to me to keep the lips moving according to the sound. To simplify the process of animation in 3ds Max I went to ‘track View’, then on the list (on the left) I clicked the ‘sound’ and I imported the original video soundtrack (with characters talking to each other)



Thanks to this I was able to match the mouth motion and the sound very easily.
The head was animated by ‘bones’ which allowed me very easily to rotate the face (with biped it could take more time). The eyes as always were linked to the dummy object by ‘look At constraint’ option.



The rest of the body was attached to the ‘biped’. With biped it was easy to animate hands and walking (for another characters).



The same thing was with Marry.

The face animation is over one minute long (1500 frames). Floyd’s face animation contains over 800 key frames.

When the mouth animating was completed (for both characters) the next step was to take care of the eyes. They are extremely important because the viewer actually looks at character’s eyes during watching. The eyes can make a character be more distinct.. To make the animation faster, Mary’s eyes were set up to fallow Floyd’s face. Thanks to this her eyes were animated automatically.