Note: Same post from CGTalk.
Hey everyone,
I’ve been working on a joint based facial rig (my first one), and wanted to see what you guys thought. Tell me what you like and don’t like about the rig. Please be as honest as possible, I believe this is the only way to learn, any feedback can only help me.
Thanks in advanced,
Josh
Hey man, good start!
Your skin weighting around the mouth from the looks of it seems to be pretty good, joint position is not my personal ideal but not too bad, overall it looks like a pretty solid basic joint rig.
It’s difficult to critique more than that without see more. How do the deformations look from the side? Are you maintaining a jaw line/skeletal structure when the mouth opens? When the cheeks move up and down are they maintaining volume? Stuff like this is really hard to discern from a video.
When thinking about a joint based rig, one of the benefits it has over say an all blendshape rig is it’s not limited by the pre-defined shapes. Joints can move anywhere and in all directions. You want to leverage that and add another layer of control so that each joint can be moved individually to give the animators finer control over areas of the face. Use the Osipa gui for gross motion then use the finer control layer when you need it. We evaluate a lot of different facial rigs and different types of setups and the most common issue we have with the setup is a general lack of control. So having this in some form or another is in my eyes a requirement for a “good” facial rig.
In your next video, show us a bit more of the rig and play the video way faster.
Thank you for your reply. I got a few critiques from a friend, so I am working on those. I have secondary controls, but didn’t show them off. I will definitely do that in the next one. Thanks again.
Josh