After a lot of work into the environment, I decided to jump back into the main character, George. I had to tweak a bit of his rig because of inaccurate paint weights, and also I felt that his rig wasn’t the best.
After adjusting his weights for the first week of the semester, I wanted to jump right into facial expressions. George doesn’t speak, so building phonemes were not exactly needed, but that meant I had to strongly communicate George’s emotions through his face and his body movements. I referenced my storyboard animatic on what expressions I needed to build.
I am currently working with Autodesk 3dsMax, so I used the Morpher modifier and created various channels for each movement (blinking, eye brow movements, etc.). I applied separate morphs to George’s body, his snout, and his bandana.
The only downside I found is that I couldn’t find a way to save the attributes I applied to create a facial expression; that way I wouldn’t have to manually change George’s face when I needed to. I do have a document with the values of each morph channel, so I have to reference that. But unfortunately, that’s the way I’m probably going have to work for now.
But here are the facial expressions of George!
I personally love how they turned out! I tried to push the expressions to the point where his face would look broken; I felt that would help push the very animated expressions within frames (but that’s for trial and error at a later stage in this production).
Next update I am planning to put George in specific positions in correlation to the animatic, and have his facial expressions to go along with it.
Until next time!
A Day with George Animation 