This week was focusing on retargeting the data onto the face on Maya.
Retargetting Brows:
I followed the lecture tutorials and and worked back and forwards with retargetting and posing. My first attempt on retargetting the brows didn’t give me the best result, so I went back to the posing file and adjusted the keyframes to get a better result. However, the brows kept twitching in unusual frames. Therefore I decided to join Dr.Kennedy’s online help to get this problem solved. He pointed out to me that I have too many keyframes that look nearly identical to eachopther, and that those frames are not neccessary to keep.
After the conversation, I went back to remove the unneccesary key frames and adjusted the posing according to the neutral frame. I narrowed it down to 4 keyframes at the end with a reasonably satisified result. Although it is not perfect, I want to ask Dr.Kennedy for how it looks for him who has good understanding of the pipeline ahead of this project (knowing whether the issue is fixable later with manual animating).
Retargetting Eyes:
I then moved on with retargetting the eyes.
It was a procss of just going back and fowards on retargtting on RETARGETTING file and adding new keyframes on POSING file. Separating files was the key to this procedure as we cannot undo the retargtting after you add many changes. Therefore having a backup file makes this process much easier.
After many attempts on retargetting, I realised that eye movement has a time lag, meaning the eye movement occuring at 74 is occuring on frame 97.
In class, after feedback I went back to fix my neutral frame of the brows so it looks more relaxed rather than worried impression due to the inner brow raise. The brows ended up having 3 frames (0, 323, and 511).
The eyes, I concluded with 8 frames being 0, 1, 29, 54, 84, 97, 285, 511. I had more frames near the start as it had so many flitching and doing movements that does not match the footage at all. Although this is still not the best, I believe it is fixable later on in manual animation. Option “Update poses with scene values” gave me the best result for the eyes.
So far this is taking the most time to fix as I don’t have good understanding of how huge error I can fix in manual animating later on in the pipeline.