Thursday, March 12, 2009

3D Animated dialog


Emotional dialog animation stepped keys from Matt Long on Vimeo.

Here is my first blocking pass of a 3D dialog I started working on, the dialog is "Are you trying to say you're jilting me?" Right now it's just stepped keys of the main poses with generic mouth shapes and expressions to convey the idea. I'm still changing the timing pretty much each time I view it after a long break, like making it have more contrast from beginning to end. It's still not quite there. I'm generally pretty happy with the phrasing, but need to break up the poses so it's more natural looking and ready for the overlapping animation when I add breakdowns. It sure does take a lot more tweaking than hand drawn 2D to not make CG look lifeless.