Messing With Morpher

Ive had a great deal of trouble trying to get morpher to behave in conjuntion with both the CAT Motion system and the Skin Modifier. It seems that attempting to create copies of the mesh after rigging does not work in the slightest. The only success ive been able to have is to turn off skin, thus losing all rigging and animation so far and then create morph targets.

Even like this it doesnt seem to work correctly so, since the amount of time left to complete the animation is quite short I have decided to not use the morpher modifier. Unfortunatly this means I cant animate the mouth during the scenes where he should be grinning or laughing.

Just to show that I am capable of using morpher I quicker created a test animation blending his slightly adjar mouth into fully open.

Morph Target Copy

Smiling

Open Mouth

Animating Process - Scene 4

In scene 4, Dr. Charles reveals his dastardly plan to the audience by unravelling his blueprints onto the desk in front of him. The words Doomsday Device Number 22 are visible at the top of the blueprint indicating the potential danger of his plan as well as the success he has had so far with the previous 21 devices (None).

This scene start in a first person view from the doctors perspective as he puts the blueprint on the desk and unravels it.

Blueprint as created in Adobe Photoshop CS4

Setting up the scene

Unravelling the blueprint in first person

View of the scene from a different angle

Camera pans up slowly to finally reveal the character

The screen shot above is the view that leads into the character grinning and then laughing manically which I am going to work on next.

Animating Process - Scene 2 & 3

Scene 2 is a short short segment where the character claps his hands to turn on the laboratory lights. It leads directly into scene 3 after the lights have flickered into life.

In scene 3 the character drums his fingers together in a thoughtful yet creepy manner. This is the end of the introduction scenes and simply jump cuts into the next scene where things get started.

Scene 2 - Clapping on the lights

Scene 3 - Drumming fingers

The drumming of the fingers was a simple yet fiddely process, animated using keyframing techniques for each finger. Once I had the initial sequence of fingers drumming I copied the frames and duplicated the sequence twice more.

Here is what it looks like at the moment:

 

The sequences feel a bit jumpy between each other so I will probably go back and try and make it flow better.