The Christmas Raptor
This Project was done as one of my Demo Reel Projects. It was done using the Truong Raptor Rig. I created it with the help of Tobias Teupel around Christmas as a fun and unique Project to show how lip-syncing can be done and the Process of learning and working together can be uplifted with a cool Idea like this one.
THE IDEA
Toby and I got the idea of creating our first project together to see how first working in a team on an important project would go for us, and second of all, to give Toby the chance to work on his lighting/look dev skills when it comes to animated sequences. I´ve planned to have a lip sync in my Demo Reel from the beginning on, so we started thinking about creatures I'd easily get the rigs for and start animating. We hadn't had a rough time searching for a project as we saw a Rex animated and talking in a video of the United Nations on LinkedIn. With me being in love with the songs of Tom Hank's "the polar express" it wasn't hard to find a sentence to lip-sync. As it was Christmastime we just choose one of my favorite lines from the Movie "Seeing is believing, and sometimes the most real things in the world are the things we can't see"
PREPARATION/BLOCKING
Toby started to block out an environment for our Christmas-themed scene and gave the basic blocking to me so I could place the raptor right where he should sit and talk. We first thought of just letting him say the sentence with a bit of body language so I started to figure out how to make him speak. The easiest way to do this, I thought, was to create blend shapes for some letters that I needed and then blend them together. I started creating the blend shapes due to his lack of mouth controls, connected them to the already existing phonemes controller set (because Truong's raptor was rigged with Advanced Skeleton), and started blocking the lip-sync. We decided to use colleagues of ours to voice act and record themselves for us as reference. It took us two people to run through the process of recording and shooting to find a voice we thought a raptor reading a cozy story could have.
IMPORTANCE + DEVELOPMENT OF BODY LANGUAGE
During the process of animating and after talking to some people for advice, ideas, and improvements we figured out, that we needed some more body movement to make the sentence interesting and visually pleasing. I then started to record myself in several ways that I thought could be good to tell the story visually like for example, making him look like he's lifting up a globe when saying "in the world".When saying "most real things" I made him point to the audience' (us) because we are much more real right now than this dinosaur but "if we just believe" we could listen to this unreal creature telling us a story.With this in mind, I wanted him to not only say this sentence out of nowhere.I wanted him to tell it in a way like he was telling a story. Then I researched a book rig, constrained it to his right hand, and built a new animation around it. We also decided to change the body movement quite often because more and more ideas came to our minds of how we could make the body language look more cool and realistic. A friend of mine then showed me his project in which he decided to rig the mouth area of his rig entirely new because it wasn´t what he wanted it to be. Then I thought about doing that as well to make some cooler looking mouth shapes but then decided to keep my existing blend shapes because of our time being limited from our school to hand in our next Demo project and get graded on that.
FINALISATION
After the final cache was given by me to Toby, he started finalizing his comp. Meanwhile, I started to put everything together in Davinci Resolve and edited the voice recording with Davinci´s Fairlight tool.
CONCLUSION
In the end, I can say that I definitely should have rigged the mouth if the time issues weren´t there. With that, I would have gained some rigging knowledge sooner.
Comments (0)
This project doesn't have any comments yet.