Disclaimer: Much to my regret, I don’t work for Disney Feature Animation but DTVA (Disney TV) so I don’t have access to any of the tools demonstrated here and as such I am not breaching any NDA. The content is just extracted from publicly available material.
If you are interested in dAnimPicker, the Disney character picker, and if you want to know how the brows are controlled at Disney, here is a short clip I extracted from a Moana Behind the Scene video.
I think I am recognizing Disney head of animation Malcon Pierce here, and if you pay attention, you will probably notice that he is shaping the brows using only a main control, 3 secondary controls and probably navigating between them using his keyboard using a pickwalking feature.
The light blue control is the main brow and the darker ones are the secondary (inner and mid brow). The dark circular just above is probably the outer brow.
I would be really curious to hear what are the controls right underneath though…. tertiary controls?
I don’t understand how people can animate heads in local (parent) space. Here is a great example on why you want to animate the head in world space rather than local space.
Our vestibular system acts as a gyroscope allowing us to keep our head’s direction independent from the rest of the body.
Using local space for the head also requires so much counter animation work, hindering granular refinement of the motion.
The motion of the body is so complex and requires a lot of finessing when the head seems so still. In production you want to have the freedom to add more layers of complexity in the body without having to counter animate the head.
Animation rigs normally offer two options when animating eyes: “world space” or “local space”.
“World space” allows you to lock the eyes in a specific world location, and pose your character without having to worry about the correct eyes direction. That kind of space sounds ideal when animating a two character shot as the aim of the eyes will not move.
Instead, “Local eyes” allows you to lock the eyes in relation to the head so when rotating the head, the eyes will automatically follow the head movement which sounds … pretty useless and unrealistic doesn’t it?
Throughout Animation Mentor, I was a “world space eyes” animator. I didn’t understand why anyone would use Local Space but during a Q&A, AM superstar graduate Mike Stern who had already landed a job at Dreamworks, planted a seed in my brain when he mentioned he was using Local Eyes rather than World and from that day on, I knew I would need to get more experience with Local Eyes and see what advantage this method would bring.
Having worked in games mostly in my early career, I never really got a chance to do much acting, let alone testing eyes parent spacing. Going into TV series and taking part in AnimSquad finally allowed me the opportunity to get more familiar with the two methods and I would now mostly animate eyes in Local Space.
“World Space” allows you to accurately lock the eyes in a specific direction which seems great at first but the eyes often end up looking totally disconnected from the head and requiring just as much finessing than Local Eyes.
People might get angry at me as this is not what is normally done in education but sometime ago I had found a great example of unsuccessful eyes animation that clearly showed the use of World Space Eyes instead of Local Eyes and it is time to bring the example back!
Don’t worry I have already told the animator about it and hopefully he will take my comments in consideration in his next pass.
The shot I am referring to is the first one and specifically what is being done on Bishop.
Using this method, the eyes are perfectly locked in space but since they are not reacting to the motion of the head, they seem to be floating around the orbital cavity and totally disconnected from the head which looks very odd and inorganic.
Now that I have more experience with acting and having had Malcon Pierce insisting on eyes focus for literally HOURS during an Animsquad expert workshop, I have fully grasped the necessity to lock the eyes firmly on the head rather than on the environment.
Eyes direction in relation to the head and eyelids is the ultimate component of acting after all. Aside from the exception of blinks, even though I will talk about this an other time, a slight variation in the position of the eyes will convey a totally different emotion so you want to keep a tight grip over the positioning of the pupil and iris.
I hope this article was useful to you and I will leave you with a little something to test your … eyes 😉
This is a shot I animated some time ago. Do you think I animated Bishop’s eyes in Local space or World space? People with experience will have no trouble spotting the space used but see for yourself!
Youtube user Spiel Kind is sharing a walkthrough of his impressive fan made Frozen’s Elsa rig.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DGG9TGJ9tWc[/youtube]
It is so impressive that even Disney temp worker Josh Sobel thought it could have been “borrowed” from Disney animation but luckily Spiel Kind documented the entire process from modeling to rigging on a CG talk thread .
He breaks down the rig by explaining how many blend shapes went into the making of that rig:
“27 blendshapes, which I divided up and/or mirrored into 90 total shapes. On top of that I also have a joint-rig though, which is responsible for the jaw/lips- and eyelid-setup.”
The explanation on CGTalk is a bit more detailed:
“It’s made up of four rigs in total. The first is a joint-rig, which drives the eyelids, eyelashes and the jaw/lip setup. Marco Giordano’s eyelid setup has been a big help for this one. The zipper setup is built after Stefan Ehrenhaus’ instructions a few pages earlier in this thread.
The second one is a blendshape setup, which drives pretty much all expressive shapes. Been using some techniques from Jason Osipa’s book Stop Staring for this one.
Both of these feed into the third setup, which is another joint-rig with just a few joints with very broad weighting … basically a poor man’s lattice.
The fourth is the eyeball setup, which works independently from the rest and only drives two joints to which the eyeballs are skinned.”
and page 5 of the CGTalk’ thread he explains what his original idea was:
“The mouth is going to be driven by a joint-rig and a blendshape-rig. The joint-rig will open the jaw and provide freeform controls for lips, nose and cheeks. The blendshape-rig will contain wide, narrow, smile, frown, lip-roll out/in/tighten, mouth up/down/left/right, upper/lower lip-puff, cheek-puff and whatever cheek-puff’s opposite is called. Each shape will be broken down into at least lefts and rights. The lip-shapes will be broken down even more and divided among the joint-rig controls with some global ones above.”
Well I guess this will tie nicely with my previous article about mouth shapes!
I am using this opportunity to plug an old article about World orient head and shoulders. I am amazed how many professional rigs don’t have such a simple constraint switch that makes animators life much easier and allows us to reach higher quotas and quality.
Animation Mentor students got a very sweet surprise this summer with the release of Bishop 2.0 but if you are not part of those privileged animators don’t despair! Squirrely Rig’s creator, Josh Burton, is working on a very very promising character, Morphy, Josh Burton’s morpheus rig.
If you have never heard about it, let me embed some very impressive videos that will certainly make your mouth salivate!
This is seriously impressive I must say and it is amazing how much the rigs keeps its appeal despite the crazy amount of transformation.
I did a very quick test as a tribute to my friends who just wrapped Megamind and I am very pleased with what I was able to achieve in only few minutes.
Well it’s out! Some really really nice work from my fellow graduates and ex coworkers.
http://www.animationmentor.com/showcase2010/
Some of them have already landed top animation jobs and others will very soon.
And while we are at it, let me introduce you Bishop 2.0, the latest version of my favourite Animation Mentor rig. I haven’t had a chance to test it yet but this looks very promising and I have to mention that my friend the awesome Keith Ribbons helped out with the facial rigging.
