Facial Rigs and Animation

This past week was spent re-rigging the face of Gol, and messing around with Dav's facial rig. I had a lot of issues with my blend shapes, which are the individual facial expressions that are then applied to the base mesh. Whenever I would manipulate the shapes, the base mesh would move into the original T pose. The facial expression would still be applied, but the skeletal rig would be completely disregarded.

After some experimentation, I created an entirely new facial GUI to control the eyes and mouth of the face. As you can see below, its in the similar shape of Gol, and makes it pretty easy to animate compared to how I had it earlier (sliders).

However, after I created the GUI, I ran into the same problem that I had before. After some trial and error I found out I had several problems. The first was the input order in which the blend shapes are applied. The second was that the base mesh had been moved, and it's transforms had been frozen after being rigged, which for reasons I don't understand, made things get ridiculous. However, I redid the base mesh, transferred the skin weights, and re-keyed all the facial expressions on the GUI, and now it works like a charm.


As you can see above, manipulating components of the face GUI affect the mesh, in meaningful ways. For example I have the sneer mapped to the nose (maybe not the most intuitive thing every created but it makes sense to me).


Above is an image of all the the blend shapes I'm using right now. I might have to go in and add a few more depending on how I map out each shot of the animation. So far they've been able to give me a good range of emotion, and I may even have more than I'll actually need, but it can't hurt.

Here is another example of how the GUI is mapped to the base mesh. I have some squinting, some sadness, some surprise, and some sneer going on. It's a pretty good time.


This is what it looks like when it's all smoothed out, without the GUI. He'll never actually give this facial expression, but I thought it would be fun to play around with what emotions I could get out of the blend shapes I have, and see if there are emotions I can't achieve.


The shot above is a bit of the behind the scenes look at what goes into creating the facial rig. To the far left is the GUI, with the Set Driven Keys window open to the right. In that you specify the driver (the GUI) and the driven (the blend shapes), and what drives what. For example the translate Y of the eyebrow will make the blend shape of the eyebrow move up and down. The blend shape slider is on the far right, showing how each of those are being manipulated according to how the facial GUI is being manipulated.

Above is a shot of what it all looks like as I'm animating a scene. Nothing too crazy, but it shows what it's like using the GUI in the scene.


I had to spend a little time messing with the eyelid blend shapes of Dav, and get his rig fixed up a little bit with the weight painting of the tunic.

I created a little GUI for his face, though it's far less extensive since he does't show his face to have emotions (how convenient, isn't it?). I just needed something to easily control his eyelids. It wasn't entirely necessary, but it will speed up the animating process, and save me more time than it took to create the GUI.

This las shot shows what its like messing with the GUI and rig while animating a scene. It's pretty neato. Now its just a matter of finishing the animating. I have half of it done, with a mixture of tough shots and simple shots. It's going to be a busy couple of weeks but all the rigging woes are behind me.