"¿Porqué te vas?" animation process
Why this song?
This was a trend a little bit back, and currently still is, using this song between two characters just calming talking/singing to each other. Not only did I like the song, but I also thought it would be great for a character pantomime test, since that's one thing I want to develop more and enjoy animating a lot!
Process:
- Reference footage
- Lip-sync
- Blocking
- Spline pass 1
- Spline pass 2
- Face expressions
- Rotoscope (WIP)
Finished animation:
Reference footage
Before I start anything with heavy acting, I always record myself acting out the shot as a reference for motions, big and subtle. This is so that I can have a good action base to work from, and incorporate more subtle yet impactful motions into my animations that I may not have thought of without seeing it myself acting in the moment.
Lip-Sync
Animating lip-sync at the start is easier as you can clearly see the face to animate the mouth, otherwise you have to animate all the mouth motions while they are moving, which sometimes makes things unclear. This is why I do all the base lip-sync animation before anything, no moving the mouth around or expressing the mouth in a frown or smile, just the talking shapes.
Blocking
The CG version of an animatic. This is where I get in the key poses of all the motions and the timing of them with the audio.
The second playthrough also shows the ref footage to help compare between the motions of the footage, and the blocking poses.
Spline pass 1
Turning the blocking into smooth motion and a bit of overlapping action.
This is where it starts to look a lot more cleaner, yet still needs a lot to be done, as there is barely any momentum (overshoot), properly spaced out spines between motions, and most importantly expressions.
Spline pass 2
Now adding proper overlapping action and momentum (overshoot) and fully refining the splines, and adding a few more subtle motions in-between what was already plotted out. At this point, the body motion is practically fully done.
Face expressions
Finally for the CG, I animated the face expressions, pupils, and refined the mouth to move around and express properly on top of the existent lip-sync. I also edited the model/rig a bit to fit more for the character this is based on to make the rotoscoping later more accurate.
I personally save doing face expressions to last as it I my favourite part of animating, as its the part that fully actualises the character and brings them to life! :D
Face motion is a very complex thing, especially for good pantomime, where a range of emotions are shown for a simple couple sentences. Just because someone is happy, doesn't mean the entire shot is going to be them with the same expression, and having animated with ink in the past, nothing shows this more than a character fully based around emotion, where his eyes change colour any time it minorly changes.
Rotoscope (Wip)
The last step for this character in the animation is rotoscoping them to give it a nice sketchy feel. This character is meant to be a hand drawn sketch, so I thought using grease pencil in blender would allow me to perfectly rotoscope the animation to give it a hand animated sketchy effect, better and more hand made than just making the CG model itself look a sketchy style. This also meant I didn't need to re-model my rig for the character, as they are similar enough to use as a base, but also since its being traced over, I can choose to leave out or add in things on the character.
By the end, I will hopefully have a smoothly animated, yet with clear line flicker, looking character, that uses my CG as a base, however is in the style of a sketch with a more hand drawn feel.
Rotoscope Time-lapse.
