Now that the animatic is complete, and actors are beginning to be selected, it's time to move forward visually. The 3Q rig was built for Evan, and I wanted to see how far it could go.
I started off with a simple vanilla walk cycle. While the legs were a big fidgety, I think I ended up with a pretty solid product.
After this was completed, I decided it would be smart to test a dialogue shot. I wanted to see if this puppet could more than just move, but act! As such, I build a pretty complicated mouth-rig that stretches pretty convincingly, and then animated the jaw frame-by-frame to move with the mouth. This is what came out:
A lot of masking techniques and squashing/stretching/timing tricks were used to cheat a lot of complicated motion. I hope it worked!
Anyway, I need to finalize my asset/shot list to be updated with my current animatic. Good week, all things considered!
~Adam