In the Week 6 Lecture, Dr Kennedy went over the Uncanny Valley. This was a concept I felt quite familiar with after a year of MoCap practice, yet it was more interesting and relevant to think about in relation to the Performance Capture project. Some key takeaways I had were
humans will have a more extreme positive or negative reaction to a character when it is moving versus a still image.
there needs to be careful attention and consideration of how the face changes from one expression to another rather than just the expressions themselves, including the wrinkles and creases in the brow and mouth.
light subsurface scattering has a lot of impact on the realism of skin textures
Another significant piece of knowledge I took away from the lecture/tutorials was to increase the size of the arrows in Maya when moving the controls (using + and - keys) as this gives you more refined movement of the controls when working with the rig.
Just like for the eyes and the brows, this week we looked at the posing for the mouth in Retargeter. I was surprised by how many mouth/jaw/chin controls there were on the rig. This proved to be an extra challenge when deciding which deformation to use in order to create the shape I was after. For me, there was a lot of trial and error, as well as replicating funny faces at my PC to understand which parts of the mouth moved to make those shapes.
The grid helped me a lot with this task because I could identify the subtle movements in the corners of the mouth. Sometimes I would think the corners lifted a lot higher than they did and flicking between the previous frame and the one I worked on helped me see that more often than not, the corners would lift less than I had first perceived.
Here are some notes on different controllers and the important keys I was working off from the original performance video. Below are some of my poses so far.
I found this process for the mouth was incredibly finicky. I think my analysis of the lips was increasingly influenced by attempting to recreate the shapes with my own face as I worked on them. It was a funny experience to say the least.
In the end, for my first retarget of the mouth I have created 19 frames.
When I played back the timeline with just the keys, it looked somewhat similar to the original performance.
I am slightly anxious anticipating the retarget next week as I know the lip balm is likely to send her lips flying into a frenzy of jitter. We shall have to wait and see.
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