Edit: I’ve updated this animation. Pushing the lip shapes and dialog accents.

Here’s a dialog animation I did to test out the facial setup of my character:

I know a medium close shot of a character just delivering a line of dialog isn’t the most interesting thing you can do in animation; however, I had a lot of fun being able to focus on it’s subtlety. I didn’t actually use any reference for this animation (not always a good thing to do), but  I recently read a book on facial psychology written by Paul Ekman and Wallace V. Friesen called “Unmasking the Face” and tried to put a lot of what I learned from that book to use. I find it very interesting what triggers a facial expression, and tried hard to show it as my character is thinking through his dialog.

Let me know what you think. I’d love to hear any and all feedback!

I’m done with my character’s rig… well, done enough anyway.  I could certainly keep working on it, as there are a lot of places I’d like to improve it;  however I need to press on and get things done.  Besides, I’ve created a flexible enough pipeline that I can easily go back and make changes/corrections and have it propagate through everything I’ve already done and am going to do.

I am now starting to do some test animations.  Not only so I can show them off in my new demo reel (that I will be making shortly), but also to find out if there are trouble spots in the rig. I’d rather find them in a short test animation, than having to deal with them in a longer animation that I’ve committed myself to :)

Here is a quick test I did to show off/test my characters clean shoulder deformations:

The animation was done quickly and I would love to tighten it up, but again I need to press onward!