Before delving into the complicated world of dialogue animation and lip-sync, I had to start with something much more simple. And animating a head turn seemed like a great place to start.

From time immemorial, animators of all sorts have practiced animating characters by doing this particular exercise. The idea is really simple: Create two contrasting poses and figure out how to transition from one to the other. In character animation, this is something you have to do all time. So getting the hang of animating head turns is key!

But as with everything in animation, it’s easier said than done. After many tries, and a whole bunch of iteration, here’s my latest attempt:

There’s definitely some things I’d change on my next attempt, such as improving the placement/position of the character’s eyes and pushing the facial asymmetry. But all and all I’m pretty satisfied with this result.

I made use of Maya’s animation layers for both of those expressions. Animation layers are fantastic as you’re able to non-destructively edit and modify the motion you’ve already created. So in this instance, I added expressions on top of some neutral head turn animations I had already created. They initially looked like this:

Keeping her expressions neutral and the motion straightforward, I created the base motion and then retimed it into an ever-so-slightly faster turn. Honestly the difference between the two speeds isn’t as significant as I would’ve liked, but shifting around those keyframes to adjust the timing proved trickier than I anticipated. Since animating these, I’ve found ways to do this more efficiently. Next time I take a crack at this sort of thing, I’ll definitely be able to retime the motion more drastically.

So that’s my latest attempt at a head turn, but several years ago I tried this exercise for the first time. Here’s what I came up with:

This was my first attempt at animating a character turn, and basically my first go at facial animation in general. I had done exclusively body mechanics shots before this, and on rigs that had very limited facial controls. So I was genuinely excited to try something new, and was even more psyched when it started to come together.

It’s not a bad first try, but looking back I definitely see many places where things went wrong. In some places the facial features are over-animated, and in other places things feel a bit too floaty and unnatural. But regardless, I remember that creating these two animations back in 2019 really boosted my confidence and motivation to animate during a time where I desperately needed it. And on top of that, these got me to venture even further into character acting!

Thanks for reading!

Amanda Rig by Artem Dubina
Dana Rig by Gabriel Salas

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