This has been a very enjoyable week or two, you can tell the time is slipping into a soup of existence, I blame our constant lockdown, 1 year in. Reactions are seemingly the bedrock of good animation, the ability to get your audience or viewer to understand what the character is not only doing but feeling. It is our reactions to events that define our inner self.
First of all we used the Monty rig, a super friendly armless beast that has fun proportions. In particular what I learnt though this process is the nature of how the face changes as we move, often accompanied my a blink. I used a fab, and very cheap NY set I bought online, after battling for a couple of days to unsuccessfully use a ridiculously high res and intense mega environment form Unreal. Sometimes, you just gotta cough up. It’ll be a long term win with lots of potential uses in the future. Here’s Monty –
After pleasantly incorporating my alembic Montys into Unreal, especially with my lovely new NY asset, I embarked upon a steep learning curve with the Twigs rig by Agora. It’s a beautiful, complex and characterful rig with really lovely deformations in the head and facial features. I decided to do a squinting stare, followed by a moment of recognition and joy.
