Animated Lips

Avatar is a 2009 american movie written and directed by James Cameron. The film is taking place in the year 2154, when humans are mining a precious mineral called unobtanium on Pandora, a planet found in the Alpha Centauri star system. As the humans continue their work on this planet, the existence of a local tribe – Na’vi – a humanoid species indigenous to Pandora is threatened with vanishing.

The central character of the Na’vi is Neytiri, princess of the Omaticaya clan, who is attracted to the film’s male protagonist, Jake Sully. The Na’vi are a ten-foot-tall (3m) blue-skinned species of sapient humanoids, who live in harmony with nature.

Neytiri was created using performance capture and its visual aspect is entirely computer generated. The artists who designed Neytiri have given a natural glow to the face, by adding green shadows to its blue skin. Some stripes were added to the forehead and the sides of the face. First feature of the mouth is a slanted dark line, defining the axis of the mouth. The lips are flashy, much bigger than a human’s lips, colored in a shade of dark pink. They also have some white shines for creating realism, that makes the lips look natural.

The designers started their work on the animated lips, making the main creases in the lips with some sketchy lines. A realistic drawing of lips describes the creases accurately. The shadow on the upper lip is darker than one on the lower lip. The digital artists have payed an incredible attention to the highlights, in other words, the light that reflects most brightly from the shiny surface of the lips. And this correct placement of the highlights took Neytiri on a realistic, dimensional quality. Also, the aspect of shading on the forms was taken into account. Once the shading of the lips was done, the designers have drawn the shading on the face around the lips. The mouth has a bow shape to it. The upper lip is like a seagull and the lower lip is more like a bow. These shape principles of animated lips remain the same, whether the mouth is open or shut. Normally, you can draw a dotted line from the middle of a person’s eye down to his/her face and find the corners of the mouth. The single condition is the person should look straight to you. That is how the width is most times determined. But, since Neytiri is animated, its mouth is only as wide as the inside corner of the eyes.

It was a tough job to design Neytiri’s lips, once because female’s lips are more challenging to draw than men’s lips, having more definition, and second, this female is not even from Earth.