hi everyone working on a personal project trying to rig an hyper real char . until now this is what i came up with.
so let s start this is the basic layout of the body bones
i decided to add a reverse jaw set up that might help to cheat a little if the animation need to.
now here there are the bones for the face set up
so the technique i decided to use for driving controls is it the following .
there will be mainly 3 layer of control .
first is a “math” based layer that means the main driver will be the corner of the mouth that will deform the cheek and surrounding by expression ( or better nodes) that reduce the amount of deformation in order to have a nice falloff, as you can see in the pic with the Local rotation axis on , i payed quite a bit of attention to the orientation of the bones in order to make them moving along the underlying muscles . under this layer there will be a set driven key layer, that will be used to move and fix a little the math layer shapes if they are not perfect already and third layer will be the layer the animator will use to tweak the shapes with those refining controls .
as you can see it s pretty straight forward .
A multiply divide node and an average node . i use an average node for later correction of the values .
so after some tests with set driven keys and constraints for driving the main jaw movement i decided to use meshes to drive the controls . What i did is just to pin the control on the mesh with a rivet here some screens of what i got.
so what u guys think? any tip , tricks , critiques or advice are more then welcome