What is it?

In a nutshell, my Flipbook Animation System gives animators a user-friendly interface to animate flipbook style expressions on 3D characters. The system is designed for use in Maya, and is able to be exported for use in Unity and other game engines.

What’s the big deal?

A game I was working on was using 3D Characters, but our Art Director wanted more cartoony illustrated facial expressions. We also needed the ability to very accurately portray mouth/lip shapes for the purposes of demonstrating visemes to teach pronounciation. A 3D rigged geometry based mouth wasn’t hitting the shapes we needed, and it wasn’t doing the original concept art any justice.

One solution was to keep adding more detail to the 3D facial rig, to force it to hit all the shapes we needed. But this was very clearly going to blow the budget given that some scenes required up to 20+ characters on screen at the same time.

Instead, I devised a new system which allowed our animators to use precisely drawn 2D sprites in place of a 3D mouth. This solved 4 problems:

1. We hit the cartoony, illustrated, frame-by-frame look that was desired.
2. We were able to very accurately portray exact mouth shapes in a clear way.
3. Performance Budget: Saved a lot of geometry. And probably 12+ bones/didn’t need to use blendshapes. +The associated animation data related to this across hundreds of animations.
4. This technique ended up saving enormous amounts of production time.
5. I was told by animators that this system was a lot more enjoyable to work with compared with traditional 3D facial rigs.

This system has also since been used for a host of other non-character related assets.