Evaluation

The task was to take an 11 second voice over from a video and create an 11 second animation that would fit to what was being said. On the whole I think my animation was acceptable. The one main issue was the fact that it wasn't 11 seconds. While this wasn't completely my fault I suppose my choice of animation was to blame. It is very disappointing to see what should be a great little animation fall down because Maya won't recognise silence in an audio file, Premiere works only when it wants to and nobody can remember how to fix the texture issues on the Morpheus rig. I did find that the Morpheus rig, while most people complained about its complexity, was quite enjoyable to have so much control, it also look the most human which, for me at least, makes it seem more professional. That being said having a professional animation and rig would be better rather than just having the professional rig. The overall animation went okay and largely without a hitch, the lip sync on the other hand was a completely different story, trying to sync lip movements to audio playing at full speed is not a wise move as I found out. I only changed it to half speed yesterday and spent the evening redoing my lip sync properly, and I'm very glad I did as it looks so much better than it previously did. The textures are the best I can come up with as nobody could remember how to fix them properly and the tutorials I looked at online were of no help at all and actually confused me even more. The Premiere decided to stop working when 48% through rendering out the AVI file even when I switched to another computer, however when I tried it today it worked perfectly every time, so I have no idea what was happening with that. One thing I will say about animation is that Playblast is my new best friend. It is great at rendering quick animations which allow you to check in real time how the animation is going and is especially useful for lip sync as my laptop really struggles to do animation.
If I were to do this again I don't think I would change anything other than the audio file so it would start with something else other than silence. That way I think Maya would recognise it so I could animate a full 11 second animation instead of a 6.18 second one.

An explanation

So you will notice that my animation is only 6.18 seconds. The reason for this is because the first few seconds of my audio is silence, to allow the person time to walk up to the table and begin his sentence. Unfortunately Maya decided not to register this silence and instead jumped straight to the voices. I couldn't find a way to fix this and instead just had to go with it. Editing it in Premier proved that while I could extend the video to 11 seconds I couldn't do the same with the audio. So in the end I decided to go with quality rather than going to the expected 11 seconds. If I had, the audio would have either been out of sync with the lips or slowed down, making it worse than it should be.

Final animation

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejafjg7TqY4&feature=youtu.be

General woes

Oh dear God and I thought the construction vehicle sent me insane. Turns out it was animation that did it. So first up the textures are still wrong, nobody can work out or remember how to fix them. The lip sync is so bad I have decided to redo it even though I have 1 day before hand in, the camera and light icons in the scene are still on holiday and are no where to be found and Premier has decided that it doesn't want to render out my image sequence as it gets to 48% and then stays there for a hour and a half before I get so mad with it I force quit and go to another computer, because when I stop the rendering it corrupts my animation folder on my hard drive so I have to go on another computer to fix it.

Just give me another cottage to texture...I'll be happy then :'(

Morpheus rig textures woes this time

Applying textures to the rig is horrific and getting them to show up in Mental Ray was even worse. In the end Steve and I figured that the best course of action was to stumble around the Hypershader looking for the skin materials and dragging the ambient colour levels so that the textures are visible when rendered. It doesn't look the best but nobody can figure out what has gone wrong with the rigs so unfortunately this is the only option I have. Also for some reason I can't select cameras or lights. Which means I can only edit cameras and lights when I make them. If I want to edit them later, tough. So the animation is starting to go a little wrong very, very late in the game. Worrying to say the least :S

Lip sync woes

I have to say lip sync is really, really horrible. Maya has trouble running the audio in time with the frames so it will skip from frame 1 to 8 and the to 17 so it's quite hard to pin down what letters or words are being spoken on which frame so I had to sort of guess. Which is pretty hard. Basically lip sync is not my strong suit.

Animation block out

Ok so it's pretty small and it's 7 seconds for some reason but still here is the block out animation so far


http://youtu.be/mfLVEDIm11I