Hey everyone!! As we reach further and further to the end of production on the next episode of Curtis Curly-Tail, I wanted to share with you all some more behind the scenes stuff into our daily process with Curtis!! Since the animation is done almost primarily in Blender, the majority of the work we do in this process stays right in the same spot!
Step One: Lip-syncing
We got to cover a bit of Lip-syncing in our last blog post, and if you are more curious about that or need a refresher, I would definitely go check this post out! Most of my work goes into animating the character’s lip-sync for each shot, which depending on the script, ranges from about 2 minutes to 5 minutes of dialogue. The first character I usually work on first is Curtis, and using keyframing techniques and shape-keys created by Brad, I am able to bring Curtis to life!
The first step is making sure the voice recording of our actors is accurately mixed and synced to the scene, which is usually a process that Brad completes for me before I take over! Then I take to the stage, listening to the recording and moving Curtis’ mouth open and closed to match the phonetic sounds I hear through my headphones. Often times I am always checking to make sure the animation matches up by playing the animation, seeing the obvious errors, and fixing them! Brad and I will even watch the animation together once I’ve finished it, and usually end up finding more small adjustments that make the animation more believable!
This is a very long process, and matching up animation to the recording sometimes takes up to a whole week for all three characters!
Step Two: Blocking and Animation Layers
This next step is almost always done by Brad, who’s talented experience in Blender and character animations, allows him to envision the scene, and animate the characters using a combination of motion-capture technology and key-frame animation. Once this is done, and the shot has been laid out with animation, the lip-sync animation is added, and I take over once more! This is usually what I would consider as cleanup, as I “clean up” the original voice animation by watching it play, and making sure it is not only timed right, but looks correct visually.
Step Three: Adding Emotion, Blinks, and Shine!
Once I’ve finished the time-consuming process that is Lip-syncing, then we get to move on to an even more fun task! A lot of the character models have shape-keys, which allow the characters to move their face into more expressions, such as smiles or frowns, and they can even blink! Have you ever noticed that when you turn, you blink before your head finishes moving? This is a fundamental in making animation look real, and adds such a nice touch to our characters as they are talking and moving! This usually entails me watching the animation, finding those head turns, and adding in the blinks manually, frame by frame.
If Curtis or Oliver are smiling during a sentence, I will turn on their shape-key to make them smile, key-frame that, and once the action ends or the shot ends, I will turn it off, and key-frame that! I do this over and over for all of the characters in the scene, widen or squint their eyes depending on the mood, and more! In this newest episode, Brad and I had the amazing idea to add eyeshine to the characters, and there will be a fun upcoming BTS on that process soon!
Once I have finished adding all of those blinks and shape-key animations, I turn to animating the eye-shine to match the eyes!! With the way we have chosen to go with our eye-shine, the white will still show through the character’s model if they blink or turn, so I have to manually animate the opacity of the eye-shine in the eyes so it doesn’t look off! This process takes a bit, and we’ve run into a couple challenges here and there, but the end result makes every minute count!
Can’t wait for the next episode? Neither can we! We are hard at work to get it out to you guys as soon as possible, and in the mean time don’t forget to watch Episode Two!
