Tuna Fish - Lip Sync Test

[Scazzino]

Here's my recently completed Tuna Fish Lip Sync Test. It's NineOh™ (0090™ one of the Autitons™ from The Autiton Archives™) doing an impression of one of Billy Blazejowski’s (Michael Keaton’s breakout role) hair brained ideas from the movie Night Shift. Thanks to all those who provided feedback in my 0090 WIP thread.

This was a simple screen test to exercise the 3D character’s phoneme morph maps and basic facial morphs in an actual lip sync and facial animation test scene using LightWave 3D 9.3's morph mixer, dope sheet and graph editor.



C&C always welcome of course.

[peemant]

Comments? Wooo I love it...The character is really nice. I watched it very slow mo also...the movements are perfect! The facial expressions are "like you know whatever" so cool! hehe

This is not good work, this is excellent.

[evenflcw]

Definitely looks good. You have done a very good job in displacing the whole face rather than just the mouth area. It looks quite natural (like skin on fat, muscles and bones; the good skin texturing naturally helps). However at times I feel that the movements of the mouth is alittle bit step-ish, that goes for the motion curves aswell as what areas displace. The curves I feel should be smoother, the phonemes blended together more. Concerning the displacement sometimes it looks like the middle of the upper lip is glued while the corners of the mouth move very freely. Kinda reminded me of some animatronic lips seen in film where you can sortof make out how where specific muscles/springs are as they fire (just on or off or few intervals rather than continuous scale). It might be that adjusting the motion curves will fix both phenomenons if no morph/part of a pose will be stuck at the same value for more than one frame.

[Cesar Montero]

The animation is great. I just had a lot of problems to be able to see the movie file. I downloaded it first, and whenever I tried to see it at my computer, it tried to open it as an HTML file. I then tried to see it directly from Firefox, and I was able this time. However, it made my browser crash. I'll have to see this piece in another computer tomorrow!

[Scazzino]

Thanks peemant!
Glad you enjoyed it!

Thanks evenflcw!
Good feedback! I'll see what I can do to smooth that out a bit more on the next one.

Thanks Cesar!
Not sure why your having trouble running it. The link is just to a simple HTML page that displays the QuickTime file embedded on the page. I haven't heard of any one else that had trouble playing it. It needs QuickTime 7 installed. Rather than trying to download the movie file, just try clicking on this link to load the HTML page that will load and play the QuickTime movie as it streams from the web.

[gusguy]

Hey looks great. The only crit I'd have is that there are a lot of symetrical mouth shapes there, adding just a little bit of assymetry will take this to the next level. great work

[Scazzino]

Thanks gusguy!

Good eye! Yup, the phoneme morphs are indeed symmetrical. I was using some of the expression morphs to introduce a bit of asymmetry since they have a L & R component, but I guess you're right, it could still use a bit more asymmetry...

[GuanoLad]

One problem that I see a lot in this kind of animation is that the "M" never comes across. It seems to be only a single frame long, and often flies by so fast you don't see the lips touch, even though in real life you see them touch and in fact stick together a little as they part.

i think the solution to this is to have at least two frames of "M" instead of just one, to give it an added emphasis and likelihood of visibility.

[Scazzino]

Thanks GuanoLad.

The M's are all held longer than one frame now, but some of them could possibly use an extra frame or two more added to really set them in, especially the ones with only 2 frames now. Currently each M is held for the following amount of frames: 2, 3, 4, 2, 5.

[Taikomochi]

My only nitpick about the animation is the transition between emotions. There's a wide range that are on display here and when the gears are grinding, the transitions seem too smooth to me. When we watch someone thinking hard and they suddenly have an idea, their face bursts into happiness as they find the key to their riddle. I don't see any bursts here. Which also ties into another worry, and that's at the high point of the animation "Hold it! Hold it! Wait a minute, Chuck!" the face isn't keeping up with the voice. I'd like to see more exaggeration in the excitedness of that moment.

Those are my only notes here, it's a great piece and I love your morphs for this model. His expression with the lip snarl on "Call Starkist" is killer.

-Chris

[Scazzino]

Thanks Chris!

Great feedback. Yeah, I think it could use more punch overall... hopefully I'll be able to push it up a notch on my next one.

[tobian]

Well I thought it was great, a lot of character, and I liked the amount of attention to detail in the eyes and brows. Keep up the good work! The skin shading is pretty nice too!

[Scazzino]

Thanks Tobian!

Much appreciated. All the surfacing was done with nodal surfaces. The skin surface uses Kappa to add some relatively fast SSS translucency.

[tobian]

Yes I've seen your work on him here and over at LW forums. very impressive nodes, skin is hard work!

[Scazzino]

Thanks Tobian

Luckily "Autiton" skin is easier than "human" skin, since I have creative license to make it look any way I want, and I'm shooting for something a little more synthetic looking than real skin which would be more difficult.

I've been following the progress on your Pluto Station too and it's most impressive, keep it up!