the horizontal head turn in the my final project is just an an animation of a head doing a full 360 turn. in the film the animation is just being rewound and fast forwarded. as seen in the gif below
the vertical head turning is achieved by placing parts of the face at different distances on the z axis, when the head is looking to the side everything is in the same place on the z axis.
the bodies are also done in the same way
there are also a ton of other expression involved as well, such as on the ears, when the character is facing either front or back and looks up, the expression makes sure that the eyes are above the ears, and vice versa when the character looks down.
Most of the things where controlled using sliders that where all located in the a controller layer, each character ad their own controller layer for things like eye position, eyebrows rotation and bod tilting and jaw size (for when a character open and close their mouth)
this is how big the expression controlling the jaw size was
Before I could even think about starting this project there was one problem i had to over come. Before when i talked about rewinding and fast forwarding the character head turn, since i was working with a video it meant i would not be able to change the characters expression without manually moving the different parts. if a character is looking to the screen is sad then looks to the side, then becomes happy then looks back to the screen. then the character will go back to looking sad as i had to rewind the head turn.
eventually I worked out an expression that would allow me over come this issue
Instead of including the expressive parts of the face in the video of the head turning, i instead put them on top of the head turn comp (he video of the head turn) in the main comp. the data for where they should be is in the head turn comp. the expression works out where the parts should be by looking the difference in time of the main comp and the head turn comp, then taking that way from the time of the main comp, the result of this is the time of where the parts should be by looking at the position value at that time.
for example: the main comp is at 5 seconds and the head turn is at 2. the expression finds the difference by doing the sum 5-(5-2) which is 3. then it says find the position value 3 seconds before the current tome. since it 5-3 seconds. it'll end up the position value at 2 seconds
some things had to be hand drawn as i felt it would be easier to do it this way, such as on hands and mouths
originally the film was going to be in colour, but because of the limited amount of time i decided that to make everything back and white instead.
