I haven't been using my blog in the last few weeks because I have been busy finishing the three courses with deadlines coming up, I've also been sorting out storage between my hard drives which has made it hard to upload anything, but I'm back on it now!
Since my last experimental post I have made two other passes at my silicone bear and made a completed head with skull armature inside:
I haven't animated the final head to the audio as it would basically be like a muppet flapping his mouth around, I didn't get the positioning of the wire in the eyebrows right, and I should have put wire in his ears to get more movement in there. It would have been good to use smaller parts of wire coming down from his mouth too, so that he has more articulation in his jowls, like you see in the dogs of Isle of Dogs.
After finishing this I moved on to creating a claymation figure I could use for another experiment, as I figured I would be able to make a claymation test to the audio pretty quickly in comparison to my bear. I turned out to be right! I slapped together the puppet in under an hour with a basic twisted wire armature covered in spectrum clay I mixed with paint thinner. Adding the paint thinner made it more malleable and didn't crack as much. The animation itself took about 1 day, spread over two. The lighting changes dramatically from the first day to the next which I made an attempt to fix in After Effects, I also needed to stabilise the shot as I bumped my phone a couple times, but After Effects solved that one easily.
I'm really happy with this animation, I feel like it syncs up to the audio really well and has a fun range of expressions that all play out smoothly. I had a lot of fun animating him and it makes me consider using claymation as a medium far more than I had done before.
I then made an attempt at 3D face replacements but using Maya went just about as well as using Blender went before. I need to practise using it over the summer to get a better understanding of it, following a course on Linked In Learning, rather than trying to jump into the deep end. I decided I'd do them with clay instead but I lost my patience with it and ended up with something I really don't like the outcome of. I made a small plaster cast of the face I could press soft clay into and then alter how I needed, but carving out the eyeholes into soft clay warped the rest of what i had sculpted and I couldn't get it to look how I wanted to. I was doing this all close to the deadline so I ended up just accepting it was going to be bad and used what I had. If I had had more time I would have thought of making face replacements that weren't segmented into the top and bottom of the face, but instead use a solid face that has pose-able eyebrows and a mouth that can be replaced. This could have been easer for me to work out in clay, so maybe I will try this another time.
For the end of the project I put together a documentation film of how I went about each experiment and my final thoughts, here it is:
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