Lip_Sync Animation Process

In this task we were asked to carefully study the performance of 1 or more characters in a live action movie, from a dual choice of films.
The two options being "The kings of comedy" and "After Hours".

I Choose after hours, as I found it to be more casual and realistic in my opinion.
I edited the video clip I wanted  to use with Encoder and After Effects to make it into a wav. file which is what Maya Recognises. I Made few sketches of mouths in different poses, to mimic the shape it takes when making certain sounds.

After planning the mouth movements relevant to my clip selection, I started playing with basic mouth and eyes movement. Sticking to my plans without shifting any of the small side controls was tricky as you can see in the clip below I tried to show as much as possible with basic blocking first. The movement is completely unrealistic but at this point I'm just making sure the lips move in conjunction with the sound.

Here is what a day later the animation graph looked like.

The animation at this point is super choppy and laggy.

The next step is practising. That's right I acted out the scene over and over again to see how I would move my arms and hands when saying things like that and turns out that instinctively I tend to move my hands as if I was showing the size and shape of the actual sculpture to someone and when listing things my hands naturally tend to make this arched movements almost as if signalling comas between the words being listed.

Here are 2 clips showing the animation at this stage and here you can see how the character now moves the hands along with that she says and her eyes move before her hands, to show that all her actions are thought out first, even before moving her hands the character moves her eyes first, except for the part where she fixes her hair; because the hair is so close to her eyes, I thought she might fix it being careful not to poke her eye or something or just to see what it looked like. So she stares at her hands throughout the whole motion and also shows how she is bothered by the fact her hair moved.

I did other small details like her breathing, the way she moves her head side to side and back and forth to show interest but also to accentuate certain words ("Ye-eah") and sounds like the letter "P" or "TR".

 Before polishing the animation I also took the liberty to add some props to give the animation some more sense but also to show how comfortable the character, as after all this scene is occurring in a cafe.

When polishing the scene I looked at smaller more settle quirks the original actress has. Such has speaking fast in a childish manner, and later slowly when she realises the other actor is interested in the product being advertised. Other things she does are Pull her eyebrows up a lot when thinking and taking this long breaths. She also speaks with what is known as a "duck face" or just speaking with her lips slightly punched out. In this scene of the movie she is meeting the protagonist and she does this as part of her acting to show she is attracted to him

The for the polished version I changed a good 60% of the frames to curved lines in the Graph Editor to smooth out the animation. I added extra frames as well to smooth correct smooth movements but adding extra frames to show some anticipation.

After finishing the animation and polishing small details like eyebrows, smaller mouth controls, the hair flick and other body movements, I took a break to refresh my perception of the animation and when I watched it again ti was pretty close to the original performance from the film but it felt off somehow. So I asked around for feedback and one of the suggestions was to exaggerate the movements and add reactions to her words

Download Final Version HERE!! : https://drive.google.com/open?id=1kFnvPTxQj_c5gLsijSt6CUSkJvM149Pz

Download the Game HERE!

Video Footage of the Game:

Youtube Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wOMsYQP-vQw

Download the Playable game here (MediaFire):

http://www.mediafire.com/file/tn5w8mifd8vaw7x/Daniel+Wawrzak+and+Manuel+Rodriguez+Artist+Garden+Project.zip

Rendered Textures

Screenshots of the Map in Unity

Modelling

Work in Maya:

Workshop - Unity Game Visuals

<<The Artist's Garden>>

In this workshop we were asked to work in collaboration with the game design students.
We formed a team of 4 persons(2 visual artists and 2 game designers), and were then assigned with he name of an artist, of whom we'd have to base our game on. Ours was "George Grosz"
We hastily began researching the artist and we found out about paintings on "Nazi" times and other war related works. So we collected some of them and started analysing everyone's skills so that we could begin to plan the level and equally distribute the amount of work. So we created a Map with named assets so that everyone could clearly tell what every was and was supposed t sit. We then gave the game designers all the numeric information they would need to start working on the map and basic scripting of the game, while we were in charge of all the visuals as stated by the workshop brief.


Sadly we were assigned with a very lazy team that refused to collaborate, and despite of our many attempts to help them help us gave us not a slight hint that they wanted to work with us.
We resigned the tasks and between myself and Daniel Wawrzak, also from the 3D Games and Animation.

 While my partner started working on the Tank model, in Maya, I spent the day modelling the skeleton on Zbrush. The next day as I imported the low poly tank into Zbrush and added tons of detail to it, Daniel worked on retopologising the skeleton model and UV-ing it for later.
The next day, I took over the skeleton and textured it while Daniel repeated the same process with the tank. The following day, I started working on unity and making the Map as well as the character mechanics, while Daniel finished UVing the tank and started working on smaller assets such as the sandbags, the plane model and the fire effect. The next day, as I textured the tank, Daniel carried on modelling the House that would sit in front of the burning tank. Continuously, we got together to import the textures into unity and distribute them accordingly, as well as fix the size of every assets to our liking, fixing all the character variables, light emissions, post production effects on the camera, such as motion blur, colour balance, curves, and contrast.  Finally, Daniel took care of recording some game footage and editing the video on adobe after effects for some final post processing and rendered for YouTube viewing.

This is the Reference images we used from George Grosz: