JoeMocap

 This week I began the unforgiveable task of cleaning the mouth. The main issues I encountered were with the corners of the mouth. They were usually too high up and needed to be pulled down in several areas - particularly when she says and rests on the word "DIE" The retargeting also seemed to mess up the pose I created for the part where she makes a FFFFF sound. The bottom lip didn't roll inward and the top lip appeared distorted, so this took up a majority of my time to fix. Her teeth were not visible but I assumed this was down to shadows. Without the tooth ever so slightly visible you couldn't really tell she was making that sound. I did notice that shifting the camera made it look a bit distorted though, so I may end up tweaking it further. The provided facecam did feel more accurate but maybe it was distorting the perspective. One of the corners of the mouth seemed to droop more when I changed cameras so I will look to fix this before I move on to the body. Befo...

(Note: This part was so uncomfortable as someone on the spectrum 😭😭 Eyes are not my friend!!) For the eyes I began with the eyeballs as I knew this would require the most manual working. The tracking overall wasn't so bad but there was lots of jerking and the movements definitely didn't match in parts. I duplicated the Y axis motion from the Right onto the Left since they're generally supposed to line up with one another. I did the same for the X axis but added a teeny bit of offset so that it would account for the difference in movement. Luckily she spends a good part with her eyes staring AT something so both of the eyes had a target and would therefore have similar positions. The tiniest changes to the slopes in the graph truly made all the difference. I honestly found the eyes didn't need a crazy amount of work - I think the retargeting came out really accurate all things considered. The main parts I worked on other than the directional movement of the eyes was ti...

 The brows weren't too bad to clean up, but the sheer amount of movement involved certainly complicated things a bit. She moves her head and it is hard to tell sometimes if her brows are moving too, or if the head's shadows are making it seem that way. She also has some twitches that the retargeting missed that I ended up manually adding in. Sometimes I was getting thrown off by the twitching. Miri's actress often has a small brow twitch and without looking at the reference it can feel like my model's brows are having a glitch. This was helped by smoothing out the graph tangents and making sure that there were only short peaks where absolutely necessary. I also added ease in to the times where the brow twitched so it wouldn't just snap in place. There are many parts where her brows are totally still so I evened out and flattened the parts that needed to stay as they were. This eliminated much of the small twitches and floatiness.   An example of the amount of twitch...

 This week I concluded my work on the face retargeting... or so I thought! The nose was missed out during the eye section! I spent some time working on it as I had made a note last week that the nose being static was throwing off some of the mouth movements. The nose doesn't move a huge amount but I made sure to key in where the nostrils flare out; though I'm not sure the limited number of nose controls really allowed for the most accurate movement. I kept to the established eye keys for this as they generally matched the biggest movements of the nose. At this stage I felt I had done all I could in the retargeting area so I put all of the retargeted sections of the face together and previewed the final result. FINAL RETARGETING Generally I thought this came out quite good all things considered! The biggest problem areas I could spot was the eyeball tracking and the tongue; both of which were advised to be manually animated anyway. Next I went through and retimed it to match the...

 This week I worked on the mouth key poses. With a slightly renewed enthusiasm knowing that the retargeting was not the end-all, I went ahead and made notes of what I thought were the max frames; My shot has some funny faces and it was tricky to match them but the resulting expressions gave me a good laugh. One thing that I found tricky was not having the nose finished before moving onto this section. Lots of wrinkles and movement in the nose area really helps to sell the look. The tongue proved quite difficult to pose in particular as there was no control to 'funnel' it (like making a taco shape with the sides lifted) which I felt was part of the shape needed for the 'thhhhhh' sound she would be making. The lower face is definitely one of the most complicated parts and took much longer - hence the late log entry! My first run through with Faceware went well but there were definitely some areas that needed working. I noticed in particular that her lower teeth didn't...