Melanie Connors | 3D Animation

My first 3D lipsync animation began with the announcement of a contest to animate a line of dialogue from Star Wars on CG Spectrum! Despite having never animated dialogue in 3D before, my love of Star Wars gave me the push I needed to dive out of my comfort zone and into new territory. I decided to give the contest a go!

I started by going back to my hobby roots of storyboarding to help me get the idea down after I chose a line from Anakin Skywalker from Star Wars: The Clone Wars! I tried to focus on the general motion and what emotions I wanted to convey, as well as the timing. At this point, I had not chosen a final rig, so I used Aang from Avatar: The Last Airbender as a stand-in.

Once I had my storyboard, I decided to film myself as a reference. I used what I had learned from my first mentor at CG Spectrum, Enric Joanmiquel, and filmed a few minutes of myself acting out the dialogue. I then chose a couple of my favorite takes and spliced them together, breaking them down to keyframes so I could continue to blocking in Maya.

I then splined the animation and added my first attempt at the lipsync! I felt the animation needed more time to breathe at the end now that I was seeing it splined, and I wanted to sneak a bit more acting in there as well. To hit both these points, I added an extra movement at the end to try and further show the character's exasperation and give the ending of the animation time to settle.

With these touches added, here is my final product! I'm so excited at how it turned out! I learned a lot about simplifying lipsync and getting good information from my reference along the way.

The first thing I did was film some reference and take my key poses from it, which I then blocked into Maya. I spent multiple days on the blocking phase thinking that the more effort I put in here, the less I would have to do later. This was incorrect! While the time I put into blocking was helpful, I had to reposition most of the body after smoothing out the center of gravity's movement. Lesson learned - sort out the COG first, then worry about the detail! :)

Once the blocking was done, I did a splining and polishing pass. I found I had a lot of issues to fix here because of the detail in my blocking, so this phase took me a while!

Finally, I added some movement to the camera and made some small tweaks to the animation. Here is the final piece! There were certainly bumps on the road of creating this animation, but it taught me some very valuable lessons that are helping me as I tackle new projects.

This was my first full-body walk cycle that I animated in 3D with the help of my mentor during my first term at CG, Enric Joanmiquel! It was a blast to make and made me start to fall in love with walk cycles :)

First, I filmed some reference of myself walking from the front, back, and side (guest starring my sister's Chow Chow). I took two takes of each angle - one was me walking normally, and one was me exaggerating the walk so I could see what rotations were going on a bit easier.

Following the method outlined at CG and from Enric, I started by blocking out the key poses in a walk cycle, focusing mainly on the legs and hips in profile. I planned on adding the side-to-side movement in the next phase.

Next, I added the side-to-side movement of the hips and focused some attention on the torso of the character.

Finally, I added some camera movement and a background picture on a moving image plane! I adjusted the lighting to give it some atmosphere as well. Here is the final product! I am pretty excited about how it came out, and I'm looking forward to using this as a foundation to explore more emotive walks in the future :)

First, I shot some reference shots to use as a guide! The next step was to start blocking in the poses - I splined the stand as I was following video tutorials, but the sit stayed in blocked mode until the next phase.

After learning about Gimbal rotation orders on Maya and implementing some feedback from Enric Joanmiquel, my mentor at the time, I finished the animation by adding the arms (which took a few passes to fix my initial work - I got Gimbal locked!), the umbrella, and the lighting! I was very happy with the animation, and I had a particularly fun time recording the reference for it.

Credits:

- Rigs used are all from the CG Spectrum Rig Library, with the exception of the Star Wars lipsync and the cat fight animation.
- The character rig used in the Star Wars lipsync is from Wonderwell Studios and can be found here: https://wonderwellstudios.gumroad.com/l/LeoRig
- The lightsaber rig used in the Star Wars lipsync is from Agora and can be found here: https://agora.community/content/lightsaber
- The cat rig used in the cat fight animation is from Agora and can be found here: https://agora.community/content/little-kitty
- Artwork used in the beginning of my demo reel and the headers on this entry were all created by me.
- Layout for headers and thumbnail were arranged in Canva: https://www.canva.com/
- Audio from the Star Wars lipsync comes from Star Wars: The Clone Wars.
- Music used in my demo reel can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yH88qRmgkGI