I've been asked how the face rig we show in some of our videos was done. This project was meant as an internal test case, but I've decided to release it in it's current form, warts an all!
This is a rather complicated rig, so I won't be surprised if there will be questions about how it's set up.
A couple of things that are worth mentioning:
- If you need something to bend in two directions, the eyelids for example, it's best to draw them "straight", otherwise you will get rather bad deformation in one of the directions. Note how the lower eyelids don't look very nice when deforming, compared to the upper eyelids that look sharp both when the eyes are open and closed.
- If possible, try and use flat colours. Shading makes it a lot harder to get a nice blend between the individual pieces.
- If you are not animating yourself, have your animator show you an example of how far he wants to be able to take the facial expressions. It's not fun having to re-do most of the rig because your animator wants to take your rig to the absolute extremes.
I hope this will be helpful to someone, I can only say it's been a very informative process on what to do and what NOT to do 😃
