This week focused on improving facial animation, especially the eyes, and continuing the final stages of the Heavy Object & Change of Mind assignment. The main facial animation material was about eye animation, including blinks, eye darts and eyebrow movement. This helped me understand that the eyes are one of the most important parts of facial acting, because they show thoughts, attention and emotion before the rest of the body reacts.
One useful point from the session was that we should not blink just for the sake of blinking. Blinks should usually happen for a reason, such as a change of thought, a change in eye direction, a major attitude change, head movement or staring. This made me realise that even a small blink can affect how the audience reads the character’s emotion. If the blink is placed randomly, it can make the animation feel less intentional.
We also learned about eye darts and how they can show that a character is thinking or gathering information. The eyes should feel like they are locking onto something, rather than floating around without purpose. I found this helpful because eye movement can make a character feel more alive, even if the body is not moving much. The lecture also explained that eyelids should react to the eye movement, which makes the face feel more connected and natural.
Another part of the lesson focused on eyebrows. We looked at how eyebrow movement can support the eyes and change the meaning of a facial expression. For example, brows can move up or down depending on the type of question, thought or emotional reaction. I found this important because the eyes and brows should not be animated separately; they need to work together as part of the same expression.
For the Facial Pose – Connecting Poses assignment, we had to take three facial poses and connect them together after addressing feedback from the previous assignment. This was more challenging than just making still poses, because I had to think about what part of the face moves first and what follows after. I also had to consider whether a blink or eye dart would help the transition feel more natural. The assignment reminded me to look at reference frame by frame, use a mirror and think about timing, slow in and slow out.
We also continued the Heavy Object & Change of Mind assignment, moving into the Spline + Polish stage. At this point, the focus was on finishing the shot, addressing feedback and checking the animation frame by frame. We had to make sure there were enough keys so the animation did not feel floaty, smooth the curves in the Graph Editor and check motion trails on important parts like the nose, hands, hips and props.
This stage felt more technical, but also very important. In blocking, the main acting and poses are created, but in spline and polish the movement needs to become smoother and more believable. I understood that polishing is not just making the animation look cleaner, but also checking if the weight, timing and spacing still support the acting idea.
I still had a lot of problems with the constraint part of the assignment, and this made me feel quite stuck during the week. I was struggling to make the object connect properly to the character’s hand, and because of that the animation did not work the way I wanted it to. The object was not following the hand correctly, so I kept having to go back and check what I had done wrong.
Marianna helped me with this and explained the constraint setup more clearly. She showed me that I first had to position the hand and key it properly. After that, I had to select the main hand controller together with the object, then go to Animation > Constrain > Parent. This helped me understand how the object could be connected to the hand during the movement.
She also explained the difference between the object being connected and not connected by using Blend Parent. When Blend Parent is set to 1, the object is connected to the hand. When it is set to 0, the object is not connected anymore. This was useful because I understood better how to switch between holding the object and letting go of it. Even though I still found it confusing, this explanation helped me move forward and made the constraint process a bit clearer.