Now that we’ve gotten the body mechanics mostly finished up, it’s time to focus on the facial animation. For me, this usually starts with the eyes. What you’ll want to do first is determine where your character wants to look at any point in the animation. So let’s do a quick pass where we animate the character looking towards the direction she’s going, focusing on key props or locations relevant to the action she’s about to take. For example, when she picks up the spray can she should look at it before grabbing it. You most likely already accounted for these things with the head animation, but in case you didn’t, you want to move the character’s head to accommodate the need to look in certain directions as well.
I’ve added a few times where the character looks behind her too, to check on her chaser’s progress. The animation of moving the eyes to look left, right, or other locations is called eye darts. One thing to keep in mind when doing eye darts is that you’ll want to make sure the eyes move very quickly from one pose to another.
Since the human eye can’t actually pan slowly, it can only focus on one point at a time, you should animate the eyes with a very quick transition, about one to two frames between poses. This means even if your character is scanning an area left to right, the eye should jump from one point to the next.
Make sure you keep this in mind when animating the eyes. Another tip is that when staring in a single direction for a long time, it might be more interesting to have the eye dart slightly. In other words, you could have the eyes look forward, but then dart slightly to the left, then slightly up, then slightly back towards the original location.
This adds personality to the eyes showing that they’re actively taking in information. The next layer of eye animation is to add blinks. Blinks are relatively simple to animate as well, but can add a lot of personality to the character. Choosing when and how fast a blink can tell the audience a lot about a character subconsciously.
So, how do we animate a blink? My go-to formula is to simply set a key frame for the starting open eye pose. Then close the eyes, maybe 20%, then close the eyes all the way. Then open the eyes, maybe 20%, and then finally open the eyes fully. This is about four key frames. Then I would usually copy these key frames throughout the dope sheet to place blinks very easily throughout my animation.
For this animation, I’ll be focusing mostly on a few types of blinks. The first type of blink is the passive blink, which is a simple blink where there just hasn’t been enough eye movement for a while. The second is an eye dart blink. This is a blink that coincides with an eye dart, especially for the more extreme eye darts where the eyes move a far distance at once.
In fact, you should always add a blink for very extreme eye darts, if you can. Unless a blink has already happened too recently. This helps smooth out eye dart motions and is a blink humans naturally tend to do. And the third type of blink is a reactionary blink to certain actions. For example, whenever our character’s head gets too close to an obstacle or prop, she should blink or close her eyes for a bit. The fourth and last kind of blink catagory should be a broader acting blink, which simply tells some sort of emotion that you might want to convey.
For example, I might have the character blink rapidly for a bit, which makes her look uncomfortable and scared about the current situation. Other than blinks there are also squints. These are used for times where the character wants to focus on something or wants to close her eyes slightly. For me, I’ll be doing some squints to make our characters seem a bit more determined.
That concludes the basic concepts behind eye animation. So now we can move on to eyebrow animation. Evolutionarily, eyebrows seem to exist almost solely as an emotional expression tool. Very few animals naturally have eyebrows. But humans naturally use eyebrows to express a wide range of emotion, angry, sad, worried, confused, surprised, et cetera.
Let’s go ahead and do a quick eyebrow pass for our animation as well. For the most part, I’ll be furrowing Abi’s brows in a concerned look to show that she’s concentrating on getting her stolen item back. Tabi’s eyebrows might be a bit more playful. Meanwhile parkour is a very intense sport and requires utmost concentration since any mistake could injure the user.
So we’ll keep a furrowed brow as the default state for both of them anyway. From there, we can add a few flourishes that help accent the rest of the animation. For example, whenever humans look left or right, their eyebrows tend to raise with a bias towards the direction they’re looking, almost as if to open the eye a bit more.
This is a common technique to follow the line of action in animation and helps exaggerate poses. So let’s go through and synchronize our eyebrows with our eye darts. Whenever our character looks left, have the left eyebrow raise a bit higher than the right eyebrow. Whenever the character looks up, have both eyebrows raise and whenever the character looks down, lower the eyebrows a bit, et cetera. This will help sell the eye darts even more and it can help make the character feel more alive.
You can also parent a camera to Tabi or Abi’s head bones and watch their face as they animate more clearly. To look through this camera, simply set it as your active camera by pressing control numpad 0.
In the next video we’ll be showing you how to animate the mouth to show different emotions and exertion.
