WIP Facial Rig

Rigging
1

Apparently when TA was having issues the other day my first post got taken down, so here it is again. This is my 2nd attempt at a facial rig. I still need the controls for the ears, the animator controls which will be the stop starring ones, and the ribbon controls for the eyelids. I figured it would be better to toss the file up here to get played with than waiting till I was finished. All comments and critiques are welcome.

www.haffnertd.com/Elf_dude_46.mb

Here’s a few poses I did just messing around with the rig and having fun with it:



Here I broke the rig for the comical factor:

(Oh snap! Jay Leno as an elf! LoL)
Edit: Things I am aware of:

-When you tilt the ears down, the side of the head caves in, a corrective shape will be used to fix that.
-The eyes do not effect the eyelids.
-Eyebrows are missing “level 2” ribbon controls.

2

Had a moment today to open this up, since you sent that email including it…

Without giving a total breakdown/critique, I’d like to just say that you should revisit some of the orientation of controls, as well as their pivots. Animators will want to use all three translate-rotate-scale for these ‘micro’ controls, so having a pivot point that allows for good deformations will be key.

Take the brows for example. The outer brow controls might have better use if they were oriented closer to the normals of the mesh, so pulling out in a local translation will match the flow of the mesh better. same with the corner lip controls.

Also, try rotating the brow controls. with the pivot outside the mesh, it’s not so useful. Same with the nose control.

The other thing that jumped out at me was naming conventions -

nasal_labial_left_ci ;
lip_left_corner_ci ;
left_eyebrow_outter_ci ;
cheek_left_uppr_outter_ci ;
lip_bttm_7_ci ;

there’s no consistent naming for where the “side” is in the name, so that will make things difficult for both scripting the setup as well as selecting things, or finding things by name.

hope that helps a bit!

3

Will definitely get those items fixed and adjusted. Thanks.

4

Here’s the newest file. I’m still setting up the controls and will also rearrange them to be more organized. Pretty sure I got all the things you pointed out Josh.

www.haffnertd.com/Elf_dude_62.mb

5

Latest file can be here. I had a minor set back but a positive one. The modeler sent me a file that had some teeth and a tongue, and were modeled extremely well. So I had to do some adjusting to fix poses to account for the new teeth. I also still have the tongue to setup but have most of the controls done. Any feed back would be awesome, file can be found here.

www.haffnertd.com/Elf_dude_65.mb

6

Here’s a quick demo of the rig as it stands, just about finished with it:

http://haffnertd.com/media/wip_facial_demo.mov

7

Dan, with out looking at the file but watching the video.

First- head bone/ctrl look to be in the wrong place, your skull does not pivot from below the chin, it happens near the ear, and that bone should reflect that. Very hard to have good looking deformations and animation when the core joints are in the wrong locations.

Nose tip- all ctrls that affect the nose deform the tip of the nose to much, it moves a little but not as drastic as you have… while the other shapes don’t spread out enough feeling very localized with respect to fall off using the joysticks.

The on face controls look like they do a very good job.

Jaw- again looks to be pivoting from the wrong location making some strange looking movement happen and the deformation not feel as solid as it should, as in, your losing the effect of a jaw bone below the surface.

lots of work put in so far, all good effort and it has come a long way since you first posted.

Brad

8

Brad,

Thanks for the post. I actually have a joint below the ear, where the neck would meet the skull, and here is a pic to show where I have it:

I did have a control rotating from that joint, but the movement looks very un-natural and the deformations was really awkward, so I moved the controls pivot to be on the middle joint and thought that looked a lot more better in terms of the head rotating. If that is about where the joint should be then I will address the weighting as that would be the cause of why it looks wrong when rotating from that spot.

As for the nose, the control I moved in the video is the master nose control, meaning it moves the entire nose and all the joints for it at once, something that is literally impossible for us to do, but was told it’s a good control to have. That is why the nose top moves as much as you saw.

I also believe I got the mouth part figured out too. A modeling friend said the mouth opening looked really odd, but couldn’t narrow it down, so when I went back and looked at it, the corners of the mouth don’t move, nor does the cheeks. So opening the jaw was extremely isolated, which is def wrong. So what I did was I added a control that will allow the animator to control how much they want the corners of the mouth to move with the jaw. It REALLY improved how the opening the mouth looks and I believe is exactly what you were talking about. I am about re-record another video with the changes of the mouth and this time I will show the nose controls instead of just yanking the master control giving a false impression of how the nose moves.

I will be posting up a link to the new video, however, I sent an email out with the link to the video in it, and I really don’t want to send them another email with a new link, as those guys are extremely busy. So I will be re-uploading it with the same name so the link will stay live.

I know this post is long, and it may seem like I am just making excuses, but I believe a lot of the things you pointed out was me showing the rig poorly.

Now if after watching the 2nd video everything is still wrong just virtually slap me and tell me it’s still jacked up, :laugh:.

9

New is up:

http://haffnertd.com/media/wip_facial_demo.mov

Let me know if this address 2 of the 3 issues you brought up or if they are still present. Thanks again for all the help/input.

10

@ nose- nostril joystick control moves the nose tip to much, skin weights or blend shape needs to be toned down a bit…I was not clear what ctrl. yes the move nose ctrl gives you extra movement and is good to show.

@ head joint- your head joint could move back a little but it would work fine, the issue as you stated, weighting. the head has a huge amount of weighting from the neck skin, making it collapse badly when rotating it

@mouth looked better in the video, part of the weighting is still odd as the lip is curling down away from the mouth instead of the way a lip should move with jaw open.

Just feel/watch your own face in the mirror for a few min and it should become clear.

must sleep, again great progress on your rig.

11

Brad,

Here’s the newest video, this one is shorter and I just focus on showing the nose and mouth, which I think I got fixed and looking better. The neck is still giving me some issues and I think I am gonna have to turn to corrective blendshapes to fix some of the issues, which would work, but some of my blendshape tools are acting up and not giving me the typical results they should. So getting the neck finished and controls for the ears is all I got left to do if you feel the lips and nose issue has been corrected. :D:

http://haffnertd.com/media/facial_demo_2.mov