![]() With Character Animator, the mindset shifts and people focus on the hero frames. One of the things you're starting to see , with The Simpsons and others, is that in hand animation the weight of each frame is equal because you're hand-drawing each of them. They need to be assured that they can makle the software work in whatever style they want. It feels like that's a crucial step in getting pro animators to take this technology seriously. They could make Homer talk, and get Homer to look - if you compare the live to the hand animation, you'll see that the mouth poses are the same for all the sounds, allowing them to get the fidelity they wanted, driven in real time by a combination of live-tracking and keyboard-driven animation. That's what they were really pleased about. Yes, and I think that's one of the things that the team got right - having the ability for people to set specific mouth poses that allow people to maintain the style of animation they want. But the main thing we see happening - Homer Simpson's mouth animations animated to Dan Castellenata's voice in a way that is very much in exactly The Simpsons style - is really just a basic capability of Character Animator, right? What you saw was a combination of Dan driving the voiceover live and the team around him driving some other animation using the keyboard. But the big thing for them was that combination of automated and keyboard-triggered animation. I don't want to go into too much detail because it's like their own special sauce on top of our systems. For this one, they balanced some keyboard triggers with the particular mouth poses, which were driven by the camera. With the controls you have in Character Animator, you can use phonemes, which are sounds, or visemes, which are the mouth poses, or a combination of the two to drive the animation. Their biggest thing, once they realized they could do it at all, was seeing how close they could get to the animation style of the regular program. ![]() What was involved in the live production? Was it just Dan Castellenata sitting at a computer and looking into a camera, or was there more involved in getting the results to look exactly like The Simpsons? From the intitial contact to what they did last night, they ended up doing a lot more with the product than we initially anticipated. So our team has been working with them, helping them push it farther and farther. They liked the level of control they could dial in to this to deliver the experience that they wanted. Think of them as loops in traditional animation. They wanted to create a bunch of other triggers. They liked that it wasn't something that could just drive the mouth poses. But when they saw what Character Animator could do, they started poking around and talking to the team. It would be pretty bold of us to go out to as The Simpsons to be one of our first flagship customers. StudioDaily: What was the genesis of this? Did The Simpsons find Character Animator on their own and think they could make it work, or did you approach them about using it for something along those lines?īill Roberts: The nice thing was that it was them who came to us. ![]() (If you download After Effects CC, you get Character Animator along with it.) We asked Adobe's Bill Roberts, senior director of video product management, for some details. ![]() How'd they do it? The animators used Adobe Character Animator, software that's been available in a preview version as part of Adobe Creative Cloud since last year. Remarkably, he looked just like Homer Simpson, even though voice actor Dan Castellaneta was performing him live. For about three minutes at the end of this Sunday's episode, Homer appeared in the Fox Studios Secret Bunker to take calls from the viewing audience. Taking the live-TV trend to counter-intuitive lengths, The Simpsons made history last night by having an animated character - Homer Simpson, no less! - conduct a live Q&A at the end of a prime-time broadcast. ![]() Homer has things like specific blink cycles and movements that may have been inconsistent with their typical animation style if they used face tracking, so David Silverman (consulting producer/animator) triggered all of Homer’s movements from the X-keys (keyboard) triggers to keep their look and animation style consistent. They wanted the actor to be free to focus on taking calls and improvising answers without worrying about his movements. Update 05/26/16: Since this story was published, we've learned that face-tracking was not used to automate facial animation for the live broadcast of The Simpsons. Adobe responded to our follow-up question with this clarification on the methodology: There was no camera or motion tracking on. In a TV First, The Simpsons Had an Animated Character Taking Phone Calls from Viewers ![]()
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