Render perspective character

Render front character

Animation

This is the final animation using the character Catwoman. She is basically a thief interested in jewelry and I have choose a scene where the dialogue can be relevant. I tried to put her in a context and added a few new things.

At first it was just Catwoman looking at the window. I decided that I needed to add something so I thought by adding a diamond shows that she was actually in a somebody's house stealing it. So here appears an objective and because it's raining there is also a conflict with the situation (cats don't like water). A scene needs an objective and a conflict or an obstacle in order to be interesting.
The story begins from the middle because the audience doesn't actually see how she broke into the house and other actions before that.

As I have explained in the previous post about acting, humans empathize with emotions. At the beginning the audience can see her thinking and being nostalgic, and everybody can relate to her when she is saying that was upset when it was raining and she could not go out and play. But as she is thinking she leads to the conclusion of what her mother was saying to her. Then that resulted in an emotion making her feeling somehow proud. This emotion leads to the gesture of her rising her catch (the diamond).

Because she is a villain what her mother said was funny to her because even her mother assumed that she would go to hell not in heaven. But her mother was actually talking to a child when she said that so that was not serious, but now when she grew up is more relevant because she is a thief.

Acting for animation

During the process of preparing the actual story of the short animation I decided to read something relevant to improve it and make it more interesting and found some great concepts which helped me understand a lot.

The book is called "Acting for animators" by Ed Hooks and it's really focusing on how animators can improve their work by understanding the acting. It is talking about how every story must have a conflict or an obstacle to overcome in order to be interesting, as well the character must have an objective. So the character should play an action in pursuit of an objective while overcoming an obstacle.

There are also some interesting and simple principles which animators must follow and keep in mind while planning a story. First thing to remember is that thinking leads to conclusions and emotions lead to actions and every emotion is an automatic value response, and animators must show that process in the character.
Empathy was a concept that I didn't know how to define before, always thinking that is sympathy. However, empathy is "feeling into" and sympathy is "feeling for".

It also talks about the theatrical reality which is only showing the parts where there is a story or a conflict. This is making the scene begin from the middle, not from the beginning.

The character should play an action until something happens to make him/her play a different action. This is also related to the concept of acting is reacting so if the character is changing action is because of the reaction. In the end a scene is basically a negotiation.

Texturing

Because I have made the rigging and skinning first, the texturing of the face didn't work as planned. Back then when I decided to begin the rigging first I didn't know that the textures won't stay in place when I move the objects if I apply them after the skinning. 

It can be seen in the pictures below the texture planned for the face. The body has just the aistandard materials that arnold provided with their specific attributes.

Catwoman blend shapes

https://app.pluralsight.com/library/courses/blend-shape-based-facial-rigging-maya-1838/table-of-contents
This is the tutorial that I have followed.

The blend shapes were mostly focused on phonemes as I in my animation would be dialogue. I have used this picture as a guide:

                                               

Here are some examples of the actual blend shapes,  most of them are made to cover multiple sounds. Another great part in that is that I could combine them at different stages and obtain something completely new.




 For the mouth I have also made blend shapes to move different parts of the lips (corners, middle and in between them).
This is really useful when the phoneme are not enough or if the character has a certain movement that adds personality.

Here is the channel box showing the phoneme attributes when the mouth control is selected.

For the eyebrows I have made 4 blend shapes on each side. Two for the up and down of the outer eyebrow and two for up and down of the inner eyebrow.

Using the set driven key I have attached the control curves (the circles) to the blend shapes.

Exactly the same process I have used for the eyelids.
Also with the face control selected the blink and rotation of the eyelids can be controlled.

Here on the left is a preview of the eye movement controlled by the eye controls.

On the right is a preview of the jaw opened and the tongue rotated.

Catwoman Rigging process

   The rigging process focused more on facial elements.The method used is divided in two parts.

 I have used an auto-rigger program which rigged the and skinned the body and the face was riggged by me following a tutorial on blend shaped based facial rigging.

First, I chose the auto rigging for the body because it was faster and straight forward and I have managed to save much more time focusing on the face. The autorigger is named Mixamo and it is actually a website on which users can upload their model and choose where the main joints are placed. After this process the users can download the model and a script for Maya.

Here is the model after the joints have been attached.  

Below is the the result of the autorigging process. The controls are basic: FK controls for the hips and spine and head, for the legs and hand there is also a switch between IK and FK.

It can be seen that the using the autorigger didn't create controls for the face, just for the head to be rotated.

The red joints are created by me. I have parented the root of them with the joint already created for the head. Because I could not create another skin, I had to find a method to add the influences from the new joints and not disturb the influences from the rest of the joints (mostly for the neck area).

This was a difficult process because it required a lot of testing and painting skin on each part.

I have created a main control for the face, attaching 3 more curves for the eyes and for the mouth. The main control has some custom attributes for the eyes like blinking and rotating. The two controls for the eyes are just for translating, and the mouth control has the phoneme attributes from the blend shapes. I have also created controls for rotating the ears, jaw, tongue, teeth and nose, and created some blend shapes to move different parts up and down for the eyebrows, lids and lips (the circles around them in the picture below are the controls).

I have also used some expressions in order to make the eye movement more organic, attaching to the rotation of the eyeball joint 50% of the rotation of the lids so that they would move together.