The pieces shown here were completed as my final year Honours project in university, where I explored the theme of displaying personality and emotion within 3D animation. I used free models of the characters Link and Zelda from Nintendo's "Legend of Zelda" franchise, because the visual style of fantasy/action is my preferred genre to work with. 

The main goal of my project was to explore how actions and emotions create a sense of personality in animation, and how the differences in the particular way in which the same action is performed can display a different type of emotion and/or personality. This is also why I used the models of Link and Zelda, as the visual similarity between male and female helps the focus to be on the action itself rather than a potential bias in terms of expected personality within different visual character designs. 

I was influenced in part by Paul Ekman's theory of basic emotions, and the use of microexpressions. I used this theory to explore the way in which emotion is displayed through the movement of facial expressions and body language, and again how these sometimes subtle differences in movement and action can change the emotion and personality being portrayed. 

The animations were all created and rendered in Autodesk Maya, then compiled into video format using Adobe Premiere Pro CC.   

Final renders of Link character expressions. From top to bottom, left to right:

Amused, angry, contempt, disgust, fear, furious, grimace, happy, judging, sorrow, surprise

Final renders of Zelda character expressions. From top to bottom, left to right:

Smirking, angry, annoyed, contempt, disgust

Playblast of Zelda reading and reacting to a letter

Playblast of Link reading and reacting to a letter

Experiments of Link showing different facial expressions/emotions.

Top row, left to right: amused, angry, furious, contempt, disgust

Bottom row, left to right: fear, grimace, joy, sorrow, surprise

Experiments of Zelda emotions/expressions.

Top row, left to right: smirking, angry, annoyed, contempt, disgust

Bottom row, left to right: fear, fondness, furious, happy

Experiments of Zelda emotions and actions. 

Top row, left to right: contemplative/mild contempt, running late, sad

Bottom row, left to right: shocked, surprise, holding a sword*, trying not to laugh.

*the sword is not visible in this pose due to the texture appearing incorrectly 

Experiments of different models, displaying different emotions and actions.

Azri rig top to bottom, left to right: debating an idea (close up and mid range shot), bored, angry, dismissing an idea, serene. 

Bottom row, left to right: 'Ultimate Beefy' and 'Ultimate Bony' model in different poses. Note that due to an issue of incompatibility between the specs of the Ultimate Bony model and the later version of Maya I was using, some textures are no longer supported and so do not display correctly. 

Playblast of Zelda model range of facial movements

'Ultimate Bony' and 'Ultimate Beefy' waving 

Hug/comforting

Angry reaction 

Test for facial movement and rig postion; nod

"oh really?" first draft 

Eyeroll/amusement

Link waving

Casual conversation short

'There, there' 

Intrigue version 1

Zelda mocking bow playblast test

Intrigue version 2

Facial rig movement test - speaking/nodding

Zelda walk cycle test

Zelda wave test