Thesis Workshop

Had the Thesis Workshop today -- first (official) step on the road to completing this monster. Even though I pretty much had my treatment written months ago, have been meeting with my advisor for weeks, and have a production schedule worked out, it's still pretty scary seeing it in black and white. I have two previous versions of the thesis handbook, but this one is mine, and that makes all the difference.

Have spent the last week or so working out details of my eyebrow rig. I figure this is the most important part of the character, and deserves a little extra time which will hopefully pay off later in animation. I'm essentially combining real anatomical concepts with traditional art and animation concepts to create eyebrows that are capable of expressing a full range of human emotion (or that's the idea, anyway). To that end, I'm using a joint-based face setup for the brows, but the joints are laid out on and constrained by curves to give smoother deformations. The upper brows are not unlike real eyebrows, but even though topologically there are two brows, I'm treating them as one unit, so that changes made to one side affect the other. I've rigged the lower brow the same way -- people don't have a lower eyebrow, but on these characters it functions as part cheeks, part lips, and part lower eyelids.

I'll be driving the brow setup using a set of custom controls inspired by Jason Osipa's fantastic book on facial animation, Stop Staring. The top level of controls will drive the main brow movements, while a second layer of controls can be used to provide emphasis -- and if that's not enough, then I can go right on the face and grab a third set of controls to drag them around. I probably won't touch those until the very last face of animation tweaking (if that). I figure it'd be a lot harder to add this kind of control in farther down the road, so I'd rather take the time now even if it turns out to be overkill.