Facial Expressions

I worked on my Morpheus face expressions today. It was pretty entertaining. I particularly enjoyed doing the stick-out-tongue one. ;)

I picked two expressions that were somewhat complicated, and then I did a simple smile for the last one. I figured that smiles are pretty important so I may as well do one. The funny thing is, the smile was the hardest one to make look natural. I was happy with the other two expressions from the get-go, but it took me a while to make the smile look less awkward. I guess there's a lot of subtle stuff that goes into making a convincing smile. I'm glad I picked that "simple" expression. ;)

Blocking

I knew I forgot something... my blog post for last week! I don't know if I made it in time, but this is supposed to be for the previous week (it's Sunday now).

Anyway, I thought I'd write a little bit about blocking. I've done a little bit of 3D animation on my own in the last couple years, but I never knew about blocking. It's a little hard to get used to, but it seems like it'll be very helpful in the long run. I can see that it allows for much finer control of frame-to-frame motion. When I would animate purely in spline, I would rely much more on letting the computer calculate the in-betweens. With blocking, I'm creating way more keyframes than I ever did before. That said, it'll definitely take some practice before I can time my animations more successfully while blocking.

That's all for now!