JoeMocap

 This week I fell slightly behind, but managed to get to work with the retargeting into Maya process. I initially struggled to get the analyzer data to actually work with the keyframes I set; but this was amended by changing the keyframe overwriting settings when prompted. The brows in my shot are really expressive and it was honestly a nightmare to get them to work with retargeter. I had no clue if certain face movements were big enough to warrant a key, but when retargeting I found the eyebrows would end up wobbling so much that I ended up needing to key in SOMETHING just to hold it in place a little longer. Though I think I may have slightly misunderstood the point of using retargeter at this stage; it's meant to check for major discrepancies and less for making any final movements. Learning this took a big weight off. I do think I managed to get the brows done as best as I could but I can definitely see where some manual fixing in Maya's graph editor will be needed. Playing...

 This week I needed to spend a little more time adjusting the mouth. My inner corner trackers had been placed incorrectly and as a result had thrown off much of the bottom lip. I took my time to adjust it and after getting a look from the tutor I was able to finalise it and set up my Maya workspace ready for keyposing. This did mean that I ran out of time to key pose the eyes as I had wanted, but I found the brow process quite straightforward since her brows don't move too dramatically in my scene. It also helped that there are so few controllers to worry about manipulating in this area of the face I needed to add a frame 1 pose as it differed quite a bit from the neutral pose, but this only involved lifting the brows in the neutral frame slightly. Overall quite simple. Next, I moved on to the eyes. I found the model didn't have the same amount of flesh on the upper eyelid as the actress did, so getting the upper eyelids to match was slightly difficult. The eyes were also a sli...

 This week I continued with tracking in Faceware Analyzer - specifically tracking the mouth. This had fewer issues than the upper face, though one part that was tricky was that, unlike the Fred footage, the Miri actress did not have an easy spot on the inner lips to track (I think the Fred trackers were able to use the cracks and wet inner lip parts, while Miri's lips were much smoother and has less defined textures to pick from). Luckily for the most part the trackers on the upper lips and corners were visible. I have been advised that I will have to manually animate the bottom lip during the segment where the bottom lip curls to cover the bottom lip tracking dots.  Sometimes her lip corners curl quite severely which led to some odd looking tracking in that area. I'm looking to have this looked over to ensure it is workable. It doesn't last too long but just to be safe.