news : pivisuals : Rig Improvements – Head/ Face Edges (Part 1)

July 8, 2017 : Rig Improvements – Head/ Face Edges (Part 1)

As previously stated, several changes were made to the character rigs for Ad Wizards. A big one was with the head/ face.

In past projects, the head was modeled like the rest of the body… three dimensionally in Lightwave. However, when I rendered out Edges, the lines around the jaw and chin area were not always consistent. Their presence depended upon the camera angle and head position/ orientation.

This took away from the cartoon look I wanted; and the only remedy I had was to add in edges after the fact in After Effects, a process that wasn’t incredibly precise and rather time consuming.

My solution was to replace the head with a flat plane.

A drawing of a face was created and projected onto this plane. Using Illustrator, I created a face for each character at five different angles – Head On (Portrait) shot, two Three Quarter shots (one for the left side and one for the right), and then two in between shots (one for the left and one for the right):

Technically, there was a flat plane for each angle of the face. They were all identical in their size and initial position, and each plane had its own surface, with each surface having the appropriate image projected onto it.

During animation, I chose which face angle I wanted and had the remaining planes out of the camera’s view (I set their y-position to some incredibly large value so it was out of sight).

The end result was that the faces had consistent edges, and I did not have to worry about spending any time in After Effects fixing aesthetic hiccups. Another good thing was that I did not have to maintain one constant face angle for a specific sequence. If I wanted to have the character turn their head, I was able to animated through the various angles and it looked pretty smooth.

That said, there were some drawbacks/ limitations. While I enjoyed the Edge control this afforded me, the work in Illustrator was time consuming. Once I got into a flow, things did go fairly quick – plus, I was able to reuse certain aspects and features from previous characters. That said, it did require an extra step in the design phase. In many cases, I was able to mirror the right and left sides; however, this was not the case for characters who had hair that was asymmetric.

Another limitation was the characters’ range of motion. Only having 5 images did limit how much I could turn their heads. Plus, I was unable to have camera shots from above or below since the image of the head would not be consistent with the rest of the body. If I had more time, I could have created more angles to improve the range of the motion for the head. For this project, it was deemed unnecessary.

Overall, I felt the positives of this rig outweighed the negatives in achieving the look I wanted for this project. At the same time, I know I can build on this setup going forward if I have future projects with similar design and aesthetic goals.

In a future post, I plan to cover in more detail how I dealt with the specific features of the face (the eyes, mouth, nose, and in some instances hair).

posted by Pi Visuals at 1:02 am