Animation, some research and some sketches

Today most of the time has been used working further on the lip sync animation. I've been struggling a lot with eyes and the feedback I got today also confirmed this. As I understood the feedback the actual movement and lip sync seemed to be working, but there was an issue with the eyes. So I tried to find some more information on it.

This site was really useful to me today:

http://www.animationtipsandtricks.com/2009/08/animating-eyes-and-eyebrows.html

Great article on the subject!

I also checked out the video at:

http://www.animationscout.tv/#1996248/Eye-Movements

But since I had already read the article on "animationtipsandtricks.com" I saw that a lot of the
the video content was the same as the written words in the article. But repetition can only make you remember better I guess.

I also changed the animation on the hands slightly in the animation, since I got comments in the feedback saying that the walkie-talkie blocked the lips a few times when the character was speaking, so since the focus is on lip syncing I realized this was something I needed to sort out.

I moved on to spline-mode just before I finished up for the night and it looks like it's working okay. I will be tweaking and polishing curves next + try to tighten and try to make the lip sync as good as possible.

Here is the result after today's animating:




I must admit that after several hours of almost only eye-animation I got a bit "sick" of the piece.. Hehe. So I found out I needed to end the night with something different, so I sat down and sketched some characters in different situations. Pretty poor line-work on this, but it was mostly to "get rid of" some leftover creativity.. Hehe.

Here you go:



Gooood night!