This post is looking at my final lip-sync animation, which I've been working on in TVPaint.
Last lip-sync session, I got feedback from Helen on how to improve the animation, which is to retain consistency better. The hair and hairline was the main issue, with the hair changing in shape & volume little by little, and the hairline having a jittery effect to it.
I fixed this up by just doing the head all over again, starting with a new rough animation layer and then doing lineart again. And within the session, I was pretty much done.
So now my animation is all done! I really enjoyed this unit all in all, mostly due to my own bias towards 2D animation. Getting back into it after units which were more experimental & foreign to me was like a nice homecoming, and was definitely a more comfortable way for me to work. I don't really have any major gripes with the sessions, they let us get on, and Katherine was very enthusiastic and helpful! The only thing I'd really change is keeping an eye on consistency. I feel like my lip-sync animation was very successful, and it's probably my favourite piece of animation I've done this year!
Showing posts with label Crime Lab. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Crime Lab. Show all posts
Thursday, May 2, 2019
Thursday, April 4, 2019
LIP-SYNC - COLOURS AND FEEDBACK
This Lip-Sync post is about how I coloured the animation and the feedback I got on the animation I considered finished.
Unlike my preferred animation program Adobe Animate, TVPaint's layers work more like digital illustration layers. What I mean by that is that they are able to fully interact with each other, to create lighting effects, the ability to choose a source layer, etc. I took advantage of this when colouring the animation.
I had three layers of animation that needed to be coloured; the main body, the head and the eyes. For each of these layers, I created a new blank animation layer underneath it. Using the paint bucket tool, set to use the layer above as a reference, I coloured each piece of animation on it's respective colour layer.
After I applied the colour, the animation looked like this:
I got some feedback from Helen on the animation. She was approving of my "less is more" method with the mouth, approving my justification for using less mouth shapes to fit my cartoony style.
The main thing to work on is consistency. The hair isn't consistent the entire way through, with it changing shape and size. One clip in particular showcases this in particular, when the character says "complicated"; the hairline keeps shifting.
So now I have this feedback, I'm gonna work on making the head look better and more consistent! Honestly, I'm glad I got more to work on, because I feel like I worked a bit too quickly on this task. That's not to say it's rushed, just that made it in a very short amount of time. But now I have something to do with the extra sessions we have on lip-sync!
Unlike my preferred animation program Adobe Animate, TVPaint's layers work more like digital illustration layers. What I mean by that is that they are able to fully interact with each other, to create lighting effects, the ability to choose a source layer, etc. I took advantage of this when colouring the animation.
I had three layers of animation that needed to be coloured; the main body, the head and the eyes. For each of these layers, I created a new blank animation layer underneath it. Using the paint bucket tool, set to use the layer above as a reference, I coloured each piece of animation on it's respective colour layer.
After I applied the colour, the animation looked like this:
I got some feedback from Helen on the animation. She was approving of my "less is more" method with the mouth, approving my justification for using less mouth shapes to fit my cartoony style.
The main thing to work on is consistency. The hair isn't consistent the entire way through, with it changing shape and size. One clip in particular showcases this in particular, when the character says "complicated"; the hairline keeps shifting.
So now I have this feedback, I'm gonna work on making the head look better and more consistent! Honestly, I'm glad I got more to work on, because I feel like I worked a bit too quickly on this task. That's not to say it's rushed, just that made it in a very short amount of time. But now I have something to do with the extra sessions we have on lip-sync!
Tuesday, April 2, 2019
LIP-SYNC - CHIN AND CLEANUP
This post is a further update for my TVPaint lip-sync animation. This time, it's on the chin movements and line cleanup.
There wasn't anything too complex to this, honestly. There were only two steps involved in this cleanup.
Firstly, there's the chin. In my rough stages, I specifically left the chin static so that I wouldn't be too focused on that when blocking out my main motions. I deliberately left it for this part of the process. It was simple enough to do, I just went through and drew chins on a new layer, that react to the extremities of the mouth shapes. When the mouth is closed or in a very small shape, it stays in a neutral position. But when the shape is more open and wide, the chin goes back down.
The rest of the animation just had to be traced over essentially. I took the opportunity to clear some inconsistencies with the body, especially with the collar and tie.
So from here, it's about colouring and getting feedback.
There wasn't anything too complex to this, honestly. There were only two steps involved in this cleanup.
Firstly, there's the chin. In my rough stages, I specifically left the chin static so that I wouldn't be too focused on that when blocking out my main motions. I deliberately left it for this part of the process. It was simple enough to do, I just went through and drew chins on a new layer, that react to the extremities of the mouth shapes. When the mouth is closed or in a very small shape, it stays in a neutral position. But when the shape is more open and wide, the chin goes back down.
The rest of the animation just had to be traced over essentially. I took the opportunity to clear some inconsistencies with the body, especially with the collar and tie.
So from here, it's about colouring and getting feedback.
Friday, March 29, 2019
LIP-SYNC - MOUTH MOVEMENTS
This post is an update on the lip-sync animation.
I've added the mouth to my character, matching up relevant mouth shapes to the audio! As mentioned in my previous post, I already have my own preset mouth shapes, which I've used for my own animations. Over time, I've refined it to an easy to use state, where less is more and using a smaller group of mouth shapes looks better than many different mouth shapes.
For example, here's a gif from a video of mine from 2017, The Can.
Every frame, a new mouth was drawn, leading to hundreds of different mouth shapes that, although they flow well, seem a little too organic in how they move into each other. The shapes and general style are fine, but their movements and the amount of shapes doesn't fit with the simpler, cartoony style of everything else.
Compare that to a gif from a 2018 animation, Nerdy and the Line.
In this gif, there's a lot of changes I made. Most notably, the limited number of mouth shapes being used. In total of 7 mouth shapes, 3 of which are just smaller versions of 3 other ones, with the 7th being a closed mouth. This is as a part of a "less is more" method I've been using; when I had mouth shapes for every possible phonic, it made lip-sync look a bit too weird and all over the place, with no cohesion. However, these shapes are similar to each other enough to look good when going from one shape to another.
Relating back to the TVPaint task, both the mouth in Nerdy and the Line and my lip-sync task are held in some kind of collection: for Nerdy it's in an Animate Symbol, and in the TVPaint lip-sync file it's in an Animbrush (again, mentioned in the previous post). I used the same mouth shapes in TVPaint as I did before, using this sheet of my mouth shapes as reference.
Using the Animbrush and a new animation layer, I went through and added mouths on top of my body and face roughs. I used my notes on the timeline as a guide, and matched them up with the relevant mouth shapes. For example, if the audio clip note requires an "A" sound, I would use the mouth shape with "A" assigned to it.
In the end, it came out looking like this!
The next step from here is cleaning up, starting with the chin. I have to make the chin move up and down as the character's mouth moves, something I've never done before. But if it goes well, hopefully it'll be a technique I can bring to my personal projects!
I've added the mouth to my character, matching up relevant mouth shapes to the audio! As mentioned in my previous post, I already have my own preset mouth shapes, which I've used for my own animations. Over time, I've refined it to an easy to use state, where less is more and using a smaller group of mouth shapes looks better than many different mouth shapes.
For example, here's a gif from a video of mine from 2017, The Can.
Every frame, a new mouth was drawn, leading to hundreds of different mouth shapes that, although they flow well, seem a little too organic in how they move into each other. The shapes and general style are fine, but their movements and the amount of shapes doesn't fit with the simpler, cartoony style of everything else.
Compare that to a gif from a 2018 animation, Nerdy and the Line.
In this gif, there's a lot of changes I made. Most notably, the limited number of mouth shapes being used. In total of 7 mouth shapes, 3 of which are just smaller versions of 3 other ones, with the 7th being a closed mouth. This is as a part of a "less is more" method I've been using; when I had mouth shapes for every possible phonic, it made lip-sync look a bit too weird and all over the place, with no cohesion. However, these shapes are similar to each other enough to look good when going from one shape to another.
Relating back to the TVPaint task, both the mouth in Nerdy and the Line and my lip-sync task are held in some kind of collection: for Nerdy it's in an Animate Symbol, and in the TVPaint lip-sync file it's in an Animbrush (again, mentioned in the previous post). I used the same mouth shapes in TVPaint as I did before, using this sheet of my mouth shapes as reference.
Using the Animbrush and a new animation layer, I went through and added mouths on top of my body and face roughs. I used my notes on the timeline as a guide, and matched them up with the relevant mouth shapes. For example, if the audio clip note requires an "A" sound, I would use the mouth shape with "A" assigned to it.
In the end, it came out looking like this!
The next step from here is cleaning up, starting with the chin. I have to make the chin move up and down as the character's mouth moves, something I've never done before. But if it goes well, hopefully it'll be a technique I can bring to my personal projects!
Thursday, March 28, 2019
LIP-SYNC - INTRODUCTION
In this session, we started on our lip-sync project!
Lip-sync in animation is where you make a character's mouth movements match up with what audible dialogue is coming out. By using various different mouth shapes, you can create believable talking animation.
For our lip-sync animation, we would be working in 2D using TVPaint; something I was VERY happy about, seeing as 2D is my preferred animation style and it'd been 4 months since last doing it. Katherine was well versed in TVPaint as well, and given her expertise with the program, she said she'd be able to help out where she can.
The first step was choosing our audio. We were given two audio clips to choose from, one from the movie Hot Fuzz and one from The Tick live action show. I chose the audio from The Tick, in which a character exclaims about a crime lab, how thorough & complicated it is, and how he likes when sidekicks have "ideas [and] theories".
We had a few set rules with the animation:
Katherine also taught us how to make an animbrush to hold all our mouth shapes. An animbrush is similar to a symbol in Flash, they act as containers of sorts to hold lots of different drawings. The animbrush for the mouths would let us go through frame by frame choosing each mouth shape we want and placing it onto the frame.
I started with the first thing I would do with any character performance, which is the body movements. It'd be a pain to start with the mouth, then make the body move, and then go back and readjust all the mouths, when I can just move them as I go with a predefined body. I wasn't too precious with the drawings, I didn't try and make them perfect.
From the audio, I got vibes of the one-shot character Mark Deveraux from Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and based my character's physical performance on them somewhat. The cockiness and the general lack of knowledge regarding crime work may have been the subconscious connection for me.
I finished my body movements relatively quickly, so I decided to move on to the eye movements. I really wanted to get the physical performance down, and getting the more emotive parts of the face done felt more important to the performance aspect.
For this whole animation, I used my cartoony style I've been using since 2013. Over time, it's been tweaked and worked on, mostly out of necessity to work in different mediums (digital illustration, animation, etc.) One of the key changes is the shape of the eyes; where it started out as a circle, the eyes now resemble ovals. I bring this up because having the oval shaped eyes allowed for more extreme and exaggerated eye movements, giving me more room to close eyelids with.
At the end of this session, this is the animation so far:
Lip-sync in animation is where you make a character's mouth movements match up with what audible dialogue is coming out. By using various different mouth shapes, you can create believable talking animation.
This session was headed by Katherine Dallimore, a NUA graduate who now runs the YouTube channel KDSketch, where she uploads storytime videos (in the same style as JaidenAnimations and TheOdd1sOut) and TVPaint tutorials.
(A storytime video uploaded to the KDSketch channel - credit: Katherine Dallimore)
For our lip-sync animation, we would be working in 2D using TVPaint; something I was VERY happy about, seeing as 2D is my preferred animation style and it'd been 4 months since last doing it. Katherine was well versed in TVPaint as well, and given her expertise with the program, she said she'd be able to help out where she can.
The first step was choosing our audio. We were given two audio clips to choose from, one from the movie Hot Fuzz and one from The Tick live action show. I chose the audio from The Tick, in which a character exclaims about a crime lab, how thorough & complicated it is, and how he likes when sidekicks have "ideas [and] theories".
We had a few set rules with the animation:
- Simple character design, as to not be too precious with a very small animation
- Only shoot from the shoulders up, no hand movements or body gestures allowed
- Express only with what you have; shoulders, head and face
- The chin should move as the mouth does
- White background
- No cuts
Katherine also taught us how to make an animbrush to hold all our mouth shapes. An animbrush is similar to a symbol in Flash, they act as containers of sorts to hold lots of different drawings. The animbrush for the mouths would let us go through frame by frame choosing each mouth shape we want and placing it onto the frame.
(The KDSketch tutorial on animbrushes - credit: Katherine Dallimore)
I started with the first thing I would do with any character performance, which is the body movements. It'd be a pain to start with the mouth, then make the body move, and then go back and readjust all the mouths, when I can just move them as I go with a predefined body. I wasn't too precious with the drawings, I didn't try and make them perfect.
From the audio, I got vibes of the one-shot character Mark Deveraux from Brooklyn Nine-Nine, and based my character's physical performance on them somewhat. The cockiness and the general lack of knowledge regarding crime work may have been the subconscious connection for me.
(Deveraux, played by Nathan Fillion, plays a detective on a show protagonists Jake and Rosa enjoy - credit: NBCUniversal)
I finished my body movements relatively quickly, so I decided to move on to the eye movements. I really wanted to get the physical performance down, and getting the more emotive parts of the face done felt more important to the performance aspect.
For this whole animation, I used my cartoony style I've been using since 2013. Over time, it's been tweaked and worked on, mostly out of necessity to work in different mediums (digital illustration, animation, etc.) One of the key changes is the shape of the eyes; where it started out as a circle, the eyes now resemble ovals. I bring this up because having the oval shaped eyes allowed for more extreme and exaggerated eye movements, giving me more room to close eyelids with.
At the end of this session, this is the animation so far:
The next step from here is easy: add a mouth. I've got my own pre-defined mouth shapes all ready, I just need to implement them. This session was a nice return to 2D animation for me, and an interesting return to TVPaint! Time away from the program has definitely helped me in coming back to it without any major "grudges"; essentially, forgetting the tricky experiences prior and trying again! Katherine was a huge help, and she seems really professional with TVPaint.
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