Reddit Mod World is a virtual event hosted by Reddit for its moderators to learn about updates and other insights from Reddit HQ. To preserve the moderators' anonymity, NVE Experience tasked me with developing a workflow that covers the speakers' faces with their personal Reddit Snoo avatars. A team of animators then delivered the final exports using the rigged puppets and workflow I developed.
I vectorized and reformatted 25 Snoo avatars in Adobe Illustrator, then imported the Illustrator files into Adobe Character Animator.
After importing the files into Character Animator, I rigged all 25 Snoo puppets with unique physics, including for hair, jewelry, accessories, and more. The rigged assets wiggle in real-time based on the camera feed.
I set up keyboard controls for specific facial expressions, allowing the eyes and mouth to create up to 21 different combinations. After the initial recording, controls were implemented to refine the Snoo puppet.
Pre-recorded footage and audio were fed into Character Animator. The recorded Snoo puppet was then exported to After Effects, motion tracked, and overlaid onto the live-action footage.
