Brian is starting to gain the ability to pull a few expressions. The recent development is the addition of brow and eyebrow controls.
The brow is controlled with a blend shape and the eyebrows are controlled with a joint system with stretchy IK spline (my favourite:)) I set up a driven key to allow the brow and eyebrow to move up and down together. The eyebrows can also be tweeked into any position as the driven key animation is applied further up the hierachy.
The next stage will be to add more preset brow and eyebrow poses like angry, sad etc. and then start work on the mouth shapes.
Here is a new walk cycle with Brian. It is actually a quick adaptation of the previous walk cycle (below).
I have rotated his hips, shoulders and head back to open up his pose. I have also pushed his feet wider apart and pointed his toes out.
All of these changes were made in the graph editor. I just grabbed the necessary curve and dragged the whole thing up or down to make the change. This preserved all the animation that I had completed previously but shifts it around to a different place... if that makes sense.
Here is my first walk cycle with Brian. This is just a quick one and I haven't paid too much attention to his character, it's just a plain walk. What I have done is hunched his back more and kept his feet and knees close together to give a nerdy effect.
When I animated for Jagex in Cambridge I found that a lot of the character in a walk cycle comes from the character design. The physical shape of the character will govern how you animate it and force character without you having to think about it. The things it won't do is give weight and secondary characteristics like a limp for example, so you do have to think about it a bit!
In Brian's case he is designed with a hunch and looks like a total geek before taking a single step. I did try puffing his chest out and it's amazing what a change it makes... I'll make a demo of some different walk styles using simple changes when I get a chance.
For now here's his first walk cycle, milestone achieved!
I realised I forgot to give Brian a tongue so I just made him one. It has a stretchy IK spline rig with 3 independent controls. I textured it with a ramp going from dark red to pink and added a procedural bump map for the taste buds. The colour is a little off at the mo, it needs to match his other flesh tones more but that's just a little tweak.
I've just finished skinning him! He currently has a jaw control and blinks which are his basic facial stuff. I will be creating blend shapes and real-time controls for his other expressions later.
This was a big step and I've been putting it off for a while so I'm glad it's done now. And after all the fuss it only took a couple of hours!
Animation tests next!
here's a celebratory (and frankly out of character) image I made to celebrate. It was inspired by a comment I received about Brian's portly shape, not my words!
