This was an exercise, though not in futility. It was quite interesting to use many available techniques to in essence simplify. It’s nowhere near where I want it to be so I hope to evolve the process somewhat. What I basically want is a simple way to put my illustrated head on my own face and have it do what I do. It’s meant for future use as well so it has to somehow be generic.
In this instance I used the following ingredients:
I tied my hair back in the second ‘test’ because the illustration clearly didn’t cover it in the first. Ignore the indexfinger-glitch in the second.
The hardest thing was to get four points of the beard’s bezier warp effect to follow the movement of the nose using the tracking data, expressions and sliders.
When I didn’t have markers I had to create them in After Effects based on tracking data from mocha. The mouth corners for example are based more on parts of my moustache than on the actual corners. I do intend to use markers next time but I just had to know if it would work.
Speaking of which, a missing ingredient is mucking-about-in-an-effort-to-get-out-of-the-box. There are a number of tutorials out there on creating a somewhat 3D face in after effects, as well as doing tracking to 2D face. I didn’t really use these, though, but I will incorporate some more of it next time.
You might want to check:
Daniel has a lot more to say on character animation in his tutorials, like these: How To Create And Rig A Realistic Puppet
The RotAE script can be found here.
And if you have any questions, feel free to ask.
And for those who are interested, here’s the Mutant Worm Facebook Fanpage. And below the thank you video.