PIERROT
10/06/19 - 01/09/19
Lipsynced Facial Animation & Modeling for Facial Animation
Independent Project
FACIAL ANIMATION
This facial animation is lipsynched to Puck's monologue from William Shakespeare's "A Midsummer Night's Dream" performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company. The performance can be found here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jh27CeneQ0c. This animation was created for an Animation production class for a facial animation assessment. I created the model with Maya and ZBrush, rigged it, and animated it for this assessment.
TEXTURED RENDERS
.png)
This portrait was created for a Facial Modeling class. This was my first time sculpting a face in ZBrush and retopologizing for facial animation. The most challenging aspect of this project was remembering the correct flow of topology around the mouth, nose, and ears. At this stage in my learning, I didn't yet understand fully how to cut UVs of faces which is why I struggled during the texturing stage because some areas of my UVs were stretched and uneven. This is why there is some distortion in some areas. Something I wish I knew when working on this model was grooming for realistic hair because the texture of the sculpted hair-cap takes away some refinement from the model.
BRIEF
Modeling for animation
The modeling and texturing were created for a facial modeling assessment. The task was to create a face with realistic proportions by drawing inspiration from celebrity faces. The theme of this assessment was duality and we had to integrate it into our work by creating a normal version of the portrait and a masked version which reveals something about the persona we created. The objectives were to model a face with proper topology for animation and create two alternate versions, one masked and the other normal.
FACIAL ANIMATION
The animated monologue was created for a facial animation assessment. The task was to rig and create a lipsynch animation to a monologue. For this assessment, we were tasked with accurately rigging, weight painting, and setting character sets.
CONCEPT DEVELOPMENT
inspiration
SKETCHES
WIP SCULPTS
This was my initial ZBrush sculpt based on concept art featured above. At this point in my experience with ZBrush I didn't know how to properly sculpt hair nor how to groom in Maya for a more realistic look. Once I had completed this draft sculpt, it became clear that my concept wasn't working as well as I'd hoped. Not much interest or character was being conveyed at this stage. This is why I decided to veer away from my concept art.
I incorporated the ruffle and shortened the hair to get a bit more closer to the pierrot concept I had explored during the inspiration stage. Although I could've taken it further, for the time frame I had to complete this assessment, this was satisfactory. Revising my concept was definitely for the best as it now had a more distinct visual language and conceptual direction.
Once everything was sculpted I used ZRemesher on everything except for the face and brought everything into Maya where I retopologized the face using QuadDraw.
FACIAL TOPOLOGY
Unsmoothed Topology
Unsmoothed Topology
Smoothed
Topology
Smoothed
Topology
UNTEXTURED FINAL MODEL
