Creating a Facial Performance
Lesson 12 from: Fundamentals of Adobe Character Animator CCTony Harmer
Creating a Facial Performance
Lesson 12 from: Fundamentals of Adobe Character Animator CCTony Harmer
Lessons
Class Introduction
07:44 2Sketching Out the Character
11:52 3Building the Face and Head
16:32 4Developing the Eyes
06:17 5Phonemes and Visemes
09:55 6Building the Body & Adding Gestures
17:46 7Checking the Hierarchy and Structure
14:33 8The Best Way To Test and Fix Problems
11:07Lesson Info
Creating a Facial Performance
The next step in doin this would be to disarm lip sync. That performance is done. If it wasn't, you could do that again and oh, I'll tell you what, a question that does come to me quite often is, "What if I've got a separate voice actor that's providing me with the audio performance." That is not uncommon at all, right? You might be great at drawing and animating. You might not want to do voices, you might be doing something in a different language to the think you're doing and you might not be comfortable within those things and that's something you can change. Let's have a look at the interface here and specifically the timeline, okay? I'll put the top level mini-system on, I'm gonna go up to there, okay? If you look at the 5th item down, you've got compute lip sync from scene audio. So, you'd do is you import audio, just as we imported a PSD earlier on, you bring that in, okay? Then you run that command. Character animator will analyze that and actually map the vision shapes to it...
. I mean, I know right? How crazy is it that it does that? But it actually does, it is amazing that it does that. Okay, so for the facial performance so, it's a given then that we disarm okay, the lip sync. We're then going to arm the face, like so, we can turn off the microphone for this, turn the camera on, okay, like that. So, there you go, the face is workin alright. Let's just make sure the eye gaze is being tracked, again that's something you could record as a separate performance if you chose to do so. I'm gonna leave the dragger because I tend to do my arm performances separately. Oh I've got a slight bit of drift in that arm there something I need to fix on that handle, don't know if you can see that. Shoulders are rising a little bit there but the puppets not drawn in the way I normally draw it so, but there you go, he's workin' alright otherwise, so. I've got the eye gaze and the face, it may be that you disarm the eye gaze and just do the face, in fact, let's do that. We'll just do that. We'll just do the face so I'm gonna wind the CTI or the playhead back to the beginning, okay. Then, remembering that stop is the square button there so that's how you stop it doin' what it's doing and the red button is to record. You might've noticed, by the way, that while I counted in when I was gonna press the button earlier, the reason I did that is because hopefully you're watching the screen and you saw the character animator actually does you a 3 count into your performance as well. So, you get, start recording in 3,2,1 and then you go from there, okay? So I counted in so you could hopefully see that. So, I'm gonna do the same thing again. I'm gonna count myself in, watch the bottom of the screen in case you missed it in the timeline and then you'll see that so, pressing that now. That's just performing with my face there. Changing my proximity to the camera, the angle of my head and so on and then I'm gonna stop just there. I'm sorry, I didn't count, I was gonna count you in but I didn't I just said, "I'm pressing that now." Anyway, I'm sure you saw it or you got a chance to see given that I'd warned you about it before so I can wind that back, okay, and hit play. (laughs) Here you are. So that performance is there and ready. Brilliant, so I could disarm the face and drag the player back to the beginning or if I wanted to be more efficient, right, I could actually hit the icon here to go back to the start but I like the dragging on this (fast speaking) which is awesome. Right, so, I'm gonna arm for eye gaze. Final time for recording here, okay. This is sort of my, the remainder of my facial performances here, right, so this is sort of the last bit I would do in that given that we've now got those performances out of the way. Playhead is back okay. Camera is on and it's got a clear view of my eyes, that bit is important. I actually think I might be just in a little bit too much shadow there with the lovely, lovely lighting. Which is fine, it doesn't really matter for this right, when you do yours you can get a bit of light in there. It's just that I'm so, so wrinkly that I had to kinda set the lights down a bit so that you can continue to eat your breakfast or whatever (laughs) but anyway. I'm going to, I will count you in for the record button this time so I'm going to hit record in 3,2,1. That's it, I'm not just concentrating on moving my eyes, I don't think it's tracking me too well but I'm not desperately worried. Right, you get the idea. I'd normally be looking left to right and up and down. It is tracking my up and down but it's struggling with my left to right at the moment. Okay, but there you go. You do that sort of performance, do all of your blinks, eye closin' if you got triggers for things like blinks I'm gonna stop that just there. Which is a common think, I typically map the B key so we're forced to blink. So I can tap B and the eyelids will just close. Because there are times where I might be saying, "Oh, my ship. Oh, I was so broken." Where, my eyes might actually close, yeah? And if you think about it, there are times when you actually close your eyes 'cuz you're trying not to recall a particular thing too vividly because it was whatever, awkward, whatever, I don't know but that kind of thing. So, once you've done that and you've got the facial movements all happy and if you need to, if you need to re-record something, right, you can simply highlight that performance, okay. So, let's just say for eye gaze, right, I wasn't thrilled with that particular performance. You can see I can highlight the things inside the timeline okay, by doing that. Now, I can record over, right. Or, if it's that dreadful, I can just delete it. Then wind it back, make sure the correct things are armed, okay and then just record again. So if I just do that one there, okay, counting in and then just do whatever movements I do, I'm just gonna go wildly up and down so it can see me. There we go. Like that. Okay and then I'll stop that just there. So, you can just record that extra input again. You get a do-over every time and it's that easy to do it. Either record over the top and keep the other performance 'cuz you can move these along in a timeline, I could move that out of the way right, and record another one or you can merge things together. There's lots and lots of different things you can do once you really used to using this stuff. Remember the aim (speaking fast) you can do all sorts of things with this. Let's focus on (laughs) just gettin' you started in working with it first. More exciting stuff for a later time. Okay, so there we go, we got those things we can scroll those things together you can move those around you get total do-overs on there and then I can disarm that and do the next thing.
Ratings and Reviews
Gary
Great Class! I am just beginning to learn Adobe Character Animator and this class was a great starter for me to learn some of the background on how the program works.