Week 6 - Mouth Key Posing

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 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 show up when they should and it made the face seem really soft when it needed to look more exaggerated. 




Generally I think her upper lip needs to be dropped throughout as its a pretty consistent issue.

The mouth also appears to open when it should be closed - this could be from the tracking but needs amending

I ended up having several help frame sin place to hold some of the longer lasting mouth expressions. This greatly helped with the hovering mouths and slack jaw look of some of the poses. After a number of tweak I had a retargeted version that I was happy with and that would (hopefully!) require less dramatic cleanups later.

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