In yesterday's ATV I saw a short clip of the character Eugene Morrow talking. As an animation teacher, I'm worried by the lack of eyelid and eyebrow muscle movement, which makes him look more lifeless. It's as if the muscles in the face stop working below the eye bags and above. Is this going to be fixed? You'd be surprised at how much eyelid and eyebrow movement there is when people talk. Not only that, if you exaggerate those muscles rather than toning them down, the characters will become even more believable rather than lifeless.
TL;DRThe clip's missing blinks came from the actor, who never blinked in the recording; they agree exaggerating facial movement can make characters feel more alive, but give no specific fix.
I love that question. So I took that video, and there's actually a longer version where he goes through these lines that he recorded for us. And I noticed when I took the video that he never blinked at all. And there was very little muscle movement around the eyes in general. I was like, this is weird.
You're talking about the one where you got it in engine.
Yeah. And I'm like, this is just strange, he's not blinking. And so I went back and I pulled up all of his videos of the actor himself and actually watched the entire clips of the same exact lines that I had playing on the character, because I'm like, oh, surely animation just didn't add the eye blinks and everything.
He doesn't blink. The actor never actually blinks.
He never blinks the entire time. I'm like, this can't be right. Because when they blink, we get that data. And our characters blink, and in the lines that are 100% acted out and set, everything moves accordingly, including the eyelids.
So it was an acting choice, partially, but also it's interesting that, and you see this in other areas within the CG world, by adding imperfections or adding more human elements, you can make it more realistic, right? That's the whole lens grime effect and things like that on the camera.
That's something the character team did a great job at, taking our base heads and then adding this.
So tell the actor to blink more.
Well, I think that's a good point, though. We do find that when you exaggerate things, it can bring it to life more, especially on a computer screen. We're putting all these effects over it. There's only so much realism. You're still not 100% there yet. And so you've got to exaggerate things, catch that person's attention. But heads are also hard because they're the things that we always look at. We all know what a head is supposed to look like because we stare at them.