Week 26: If Only Starting Polish were Easy

This week has heralded the return of the 3D work! (not surprising given the amount of 3D in my film). Before starting to polish my animations, I needed to create some final additions to each of my character skin rigs, which my segmented rigs were lacking:

Facial expressions and eye rigs!

While I would have loved to create an in-depth rigging system to control the characters' facial expressions (I know it sounds sarcastic, but that is true- I was actually really excited to try and make some complex facial rigs), I unfortunately didn't have enough time to set up that type of rigging system and still finish everything else I need to for my film. So, my characters' facial expressions have all been set up with pose morphs. A simple solution, but still pretty fun to implement and start setting up expressions in! It's been a while since I've used C4D's sculpting tools, so using them to make each facial morph was actually pretty fun! In order to not waste precious time on making a massive amount of facial expressions for each character, I referenced my storyboards and script to figure out exactly which facial expressions and morphs I'd need for the film. So not too much variety, but still an efficient process. Arne wound up clocking in with the most facial expressions due to the focus on him in the film, and the number of facial close-ups he has. Signe, only being on the screen for a short amount of time, wound up having very few facial expressions- which feels odd, but it's economical.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f9qXjmyTaL0

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MyLpH_JOixQ

What was fun about doing these facial expressions was trying to put a specific sort of character feel in for each of them, particularly Arne and Signe. I could have easily just taken random references for each expression and knit them all together, but I wanted their facial expressions (as limited as they may be) still have a unique feel for them as characters. As a result, I wound up taking reference/inspiration for their facial expressions from some different acting performances for characters that I felt were pretty close to them. For Signe, her main character inspiration/reference wound up being Thusnelda from Barbarians; a very fierce and determined woman, but who still has a sense of being a bit at a loss as to who she is and her place in the world. For Arne, I wound up taking facial cues largely from Geralt of Rivia, particularly from CDPR's The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt. This is a character who wants to do what he thinks is the right thing, in a world where right and wrong are increasingly hard to distinguish. This performance has a lot of very subtle facial expressions and cues that give off a lot of emotion, which I really wanted to try and replicate with Arne.

With these new facial expressions, I also set up some basic eye rigs for each of the characters using some basic nulls and drivers. This also meant I was able to play around with some nodal editing in XPresso to set up those drivers to connect the controls to the eyes, which was actually pretty interesting to go back into. It's been a while since I've done some nodal editing, and the problem-solving for it was pretty satisfying!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nYUjOJExec

With this set up I *should* have been able to start working on my polished animations, however, an issue soon introduced itself: some sort of incompatibility between the segmented and skinned rigs. Though I didn't drastically change the rigs, reweighting items to the rigs had somehow altered them enough for Cinema to consider it different somehow, resulting in some... less than stellar situations where polygons would randomly decide their place was *not* where they originally were. To correct this, I had to dedicate some time unifying the skinned and segmented rigs of all three characters into one master file for each one, that the segmented and skinned rigs could then be pulled from. It was a tedious process doing it for all of them, but I eventually got it working!

With this done, I could finally start work on polishing my animations by adding the skinned rigs to them! I do still have to make adjustments on a case-by-case basis for each animation depending on how the deformations look for different animations, but all in all, it's all starting to come together!