Realistic Facial Animation

The face, more often than none, is the part of the animation that will drag it into the valley so quick you can't even say uncanny. Therefore I decided facial animation was very appropriate for the realistic animation experimentation. I decided the seven human emotion would be a challenging thing to recreate well. Underneath is a video of the seven emotions with a slowmo breakdown of each emotion. Under that are the individual emotions.

The 7 Human Emotions from Aaron Long on Vimeo.
I found the realistic model was much more enjoyable to animate. I think it may be because realistic is so much more familiar to me, to everyone. Its every day life and all you are doing is trying to recreate it. I would say it is also more self satisfying. With an abstract character you need to look to others for there opinion on wether it is funny or good, but for the realistic you can tell if its close to reality or not because you have been looking at it your whole life. In that respect it was easier in the way that you didn't need to be that creative to copy nature. The hard part is that copying nature is no walk in the park and is very time consuming. From these animations I compiled my findings and put them into a booklet I created.