Andrew Bishop

Boom. Displacement. I didn't get to spend as much time on this as I would have liked to this week, but I did have enough time to add at least one displacement texture to the rig that triggers with one of my driven key expression controls. What I was able to do was export the base mesh of my character with her brows lowered into the anger pose. I took that into ZBrush and sculpted some little wrinkles onto the eye brows. After exporting the maps and setting up a shader in Renderman for Maya I could insert a Multiply/Divide Node into the shader graph which would just multiply my displacement map by a value from 0 to 1. This essentially just lets me turn the displacement on by multiplying by 1 and off by multiplying by 0. I'm no master sculptor, but for this test, this map did the trick. This is a pretty simple setup since I'm only using one triggered displacement. However, I realized that if I had a base-displacement for skin pores or anything like th

The Final Stretch As this term comes to a close, I've been working on trying to compare the blendshape and joint facial rigs that I have spent most of this term making. I went through a few options that I had for comparing these rigs and ultimately ended on just doing an expression test with each rig to see how different they looked doing the same expressions. Answer: They look nearly identical. I don't know if this is a result of my creating the base blendshapes from the joint's poses or if it's just a result of my pose styles leaking into each one causing them to look similar. Either way, they are similar, but not quite the same. There are small differences that I can analyze to learn about the advantages of each type of rig. This process was kind of fun, since I haven't done anything like it before. The image above is how  I had my Maya interface organized so that I could edit each face's poses side-by-side. On the left screen, I have two views th

Progress on the Blendshapes This week I spent most of my time working on the rig and shapes for the blendshape rig. I'll post before and after pictures from the changes I've made. Angry - Before Angry - After Sad - Before Sad - After Other Shape Improvements This is basically where I wanted to be this week. If I had more time, I would have liked to define more poses, but for the purposes of exploration, I think just cleaning up these ones is enough to have taught me a good amount. Issues from this week Some issues that I ran into this week while working with the blendshapes: When you are editing blendshapes, if the weight map has a value of zero on a vertex, it won't move in the viewport, but once you turn edit mode off for the shape, it snaps to where ever you tried to move it to before. When you edit blendshape that is on the left side of the face, you'd want to just mirror it, but you hav

Goals for the past week In the last week, my goals were to finish up the joints based-facial rig and begin working on setting up the blendshape facial rig. Outcomes I was able to complete the setup of my blendshape rig, but I don't think I got the joint rig as far as I would have liked. They are both using the same GUI curves, but are set up in two different Maya scenes. To make the blendshapes that I currently have, I just turned my joint poses on and duplicated the geo, then used those as targets for the blendshapes. I'll go ahead and post the shapes that I have for the joint rig vs. the blend rig, but they are largely the same. There are a few details that I was able to fix in one but not the other, but so far it was mostly just setup, not a ton of editing.                     BlendShapes                                                                                   Joints Neutral  Smile  Frown  Narrow Mouth  Angry Face

Sam's Face This week I've gotten to spend a good amount of time working on Sam's face. Most of what I have done involved setting up some of the set-driven-keys (SDKs) for expressions. This basically just combines a bunch of controller movements into one slider to make things more direct for the animator. Right now the SDKs are still pretty basic, so I'm hoping to keep building on them in the coming weeks, but for this week, I'm just trying to get the base rig done so I can move on to my next face and starting the blendshape rig. SDKs These are the basic setups that I have for Sam's face. The blue controllers are for me (the rigger) to set up the SDK poses prior to performance animation and the red controllers are for the animator to be able to tweak the poses I setup or create entirely new ones if needed. The outline of her face to the side houses all the sliders for turning on the preset shapes I'm making. Eyes Here are some exam

Ideas or Something Well, I tried my hardest to find some resources to help narrow down my thesis-finding expedition. Unfortunately, I haven't made much progress (I don't feel like I have anyway). I've attempted to contact a few Drexel Alumni, namely David Lally, Glenn Winters, and Girish Balakrishnan, but I've only heard anything back from Girish so far. I haven't yet gotten to have a discussion with any of them yet to help narrow down my thesis topics. I spoke to Milady to see if she knew any one who was currently working in the industry with rigs and animation and she has given me information for one of her prior colleagues who does rigging and scripting, so I'm hoping to hear back from him soon. I've also looked through the SIGGRAPH paper archives for years of 2013-2018. I found one paper that talked about lip sync animation using input audio data. I found this paper very interesting and might be interested in focusing on something involvin