Well it took all night long to render, and ages to re-sync the audio with the animation afterwards (still not ENTIRELY happy with this but its much better than it was), but finally the ABC song is complete! Which is a great relief as I was getting sick of hearing it.
So yay for bank holidays and getting lots of work done!
Also I just realised I forgot her eyelashes... which is creepy... but its too late now as itd mess up my blendshapes, so oh well.
Following my last post (which was yestday I believe) I have finished the blendshapes for my new girl as well as rigging her up. She can now make all of the phenome shapes with her mouth, blink ad look around, move her head neck and shoulders, and has a lovely new set of rigged pearly whites and a rigged tongue, to further enhance how realistic her pronunciation appears.
Still getting the hang of the lip syncing at the moment, but the alphabet song is coming along nicely; about half way actually.
One thing I didn't even think about initially was the fac that when speaking we do not return our mouths to the rest position after each letter. This really threw me at first and I didnt realise why it looked so off until I realised the H I of the ABC song was pronouced HEY CHIY.
I'm proud to say I remembered how to rig the eyes right this time so that they didnt fly about, though I had a few issuses for a moment with the hair flying about intead, but I quickly figured oujt it was just a case of forgetting to delete the history on the skull... and each curve of hair (I miss blender already); so it was a rather easy fix once I took a minute to think about it.
All the phenomes:
Close up of CDGJNRSYZ (Hard)
Close up of CDGNRSYZ (Soft)
Close up of F V
Close up of L
Close up of M B V
Close up of Th
Close up of W Q
Hopefully on my next post I shall have the animated video of her singing the ABC song .
First of all today I finally got the time to finish up the hair on my newest lady. Still haven't named her so any suggestions would be nice.
Here she is all haired up:
And if you're wondering 'why white hair?', cause I think its cool; that's why.
Also I now have the simple blendshapes for the vowels A E I O and U working. Took a lot more effort with such a higher poly count but I think it looks quite nice. Some of them appear very similar, but thats simple because they actually ARE in real life; but trust me, there are subtle differences:
Rest
A/I
E
O
U
Next up is the rest of the consonants then some basic rigging and eventually the aim is to have her sing the ABC song. Not sure about expressions yet though. I'm not sure if they'll clash with the mouth movements too much or not...
Its my first day of not working at my weekend job, the sun is shining, and a miracle has occurred.
I have finally worked out how to get Maya hair working!!! Many months ago I attempted to work with Maya hair only to hit a dead end but NOW, now it does what I say at LAST!!!!
I'm not sure what it was that made me go back to this model, possibly just my own stubbornness; but nonetheless I felt the urge to revisit an old face model I had hoped to animate with blendshapes at one point, and clean it up.
Basically I worked out part of the problem was not enough UVs, and so I created another 'skull' mesh inside the head of the model I'd been using and bam; problem solved! Next was getting the actual hair to do what I wanted... slightly harder. But with rooting through a few tutorials I've found that using EP curves and then assigning them to a hair group does the trick, and gives me loads of control over styling.
As some of the readers here may know (and tease me about regularly) I am a big fan of Vocaloid, the voice synthesis software packages which basically amount to a 'singer in a box'.
One of my favourite aspects of listening to Vocaloid songs is not only the sheer amount of different kinds of songs made, ranging from rock to ballads, creepy, pop, or just plain weird; but the real reason is that (even though some of the best get licenced to Sony or what-not for the games) pretty much ALL of the Vocaloid songs are fan-made. The music is written and performed by the fans, the lyrics are written by them and have to be heavily edited to get the right rhythms, notes and emotions, and the promotional videos are all made by the FANS; virtual unknowns who in some cases have built outstanding careers of the hobby. I find this very inspirational.
But every now and again a video comes along and blows your mind.
This is one of those videos.
Upon watching 'Corruption Garden' performed by Luka Megurine with music and lyrics by 'CAZ' and animated by 'Ikeda' (not a clue who that is but I tip my hat to them); all I could think was WOW!
This animation is so flawless it looks something straight from Square Enix, and the song is awesome to boot.
Whether your a fan of Vocaloid or not, the video alone is well worth a look just for its STUNNING animation.
Well I hate to say it but as of the last two weeks I have pretty much nothing to show for myself in terms of uni work... the little work I have done is to start on my essay about 'Why various ceramicists showing us photos of various pots is relevant to my life'.
This has mainly been due to the fact I've been working at both my internship and weekend job simultaneously. However as of the end of this week I will no longer HAVE my weekend job and so will have weekends free to work (and play).
However, I have made, I feel, a great deal of progress in learning to use blender. I can now successfully model, UV map, Texture, Rig, Weight and Animate in blender, which... I'm starting to think is much easier to use than Maya. Though it probably wouldn't be much use for high poly work I'm definitely really starting to appreciate some of the perks of the program indeed.
