Before we head to blocking plus, there are some concepts in character animations that need to be documented.
- moving holds
In the real world, even when humans and animals are at rest, their limbs are always engaged in subtle movements, some of which are so slight that they are imperceptible to the naked eye. Therefore, when we aim to create lifelike character animations in the 3D world, it is necessary to incorporate such minute movements, such as breathing and slight head tremors. These tiny activities can make a character appear more like a living being at rest rather than a completely motionless statue, and this technique is known as “Moving Holds”.
This video well interprets the basic principle of moving holds and how to achieve it.
In my animation, when the character says “That’s why I stopped”, there is an action of leaning forward and holding the body. At this time, the technique of Moving Holds needs to be used: making some slight undulations of the character’s trunk and head, similar to the breathing effect, to make it look more vivid.
2.Mouth shapes (phonemes)
When people speak, they can produce different syllables by coordinating different vocal resonances and mouth shapes. In animation, the changes in the mouth shapes of characters when they speak are very important. Animators need to exaggerate them and combine them with other body languages to highlight the emotions of the characters when they speak. We can notice that people’s mouth shapes have certain characteristics when they produce different syllables. Therefore, when making the animation of characters speaking, it is necessary to consider the different syllables in the lines and synchronize the mouth shapes with the dialogue.
However, the faces of cartoon characters do not have as rich a muscle group as real human faces to drive expressions. Therefore, when creating mouth shape changes, we must simplify the changes in mouth shapes and adjust the mouth shape specifically by identifying the main syllables in the sentence. For example, when someone says “How’s it going”, the mouth shape is like saying “howzit goin”. So when making animations, we only need to extract the main syllables and create the corresponding mouth shape changes.