So I came back from Siggraph a couple of months ago and dove straight into an intense crunch time where I work, so I havent had much time to work on some of my stuff but now I seem to have a bit of more time on my hands.
While I went to Siggraph I had the opportunity to talk to some amazing people from the industry, got a lot of feedback for my reel and Manny and all that.
Now that I am back home, I can tackle those feedbacks and fix some stuff that, when told about made sense to me, and I still want to improve and make my stuff better.
One of the things from the feedback was the facial rig, and it was also something I was experimenting with before leaving to Vancouver.
Heres my current setup for the facial rig… It is functional, it works, but I believe I can push it further to get more appeal, more range of motion and overall better performance not just for the animators, but for the aesthetics of the character per se.
This is my current joint setup, and again, it works but i would like to add more life to it, so I’m basically going to erase his face rig and rebuild it from the ground up.
So in this setup I mainly focused on curve based ribbon setups. Using the point on curve info node to connect my skin joints to a curve, then driving that curve with other joins so i can have a nice falloff in the facial motion. I used this setup for basically the entire thing, mouth, eyes, eyebrows. In the eyebrows i was mostly experimenting with that curve using ik handles for each joint, basically, the joints are in a sufficient distance so that, when you move the controls and the ik starts to behave and move the joints, they move along the surface of his forehead/skull, giving the illusion of when you move your eyebrows and your skin slides on your forehead and slides on the top part of your eye sockets. It is a very cool effect i managed to accomplish with this setup, but im thinking i can achieve the same thing without all the weight of the whole facal rig.
So this is my new plan… roughly. So the blue balls are going to be roughly my skin joints and the red ones are going to be my driver joints that are going to drive the facial setup. My approach this time is to position the joints where aesthetically and design wise makes sense instead on just placing them raw on certain vertices or edges in the polyflow of the character. I have done some several trials of this approach at work with good success so far. SOOOOOO i am going to test that approach with my buddy Manny over here. I also want to do better skinning on his facial rig, i want to make it look UNFFF sooooo gooooood. Tho my challenge right now is that, the mouth is a bit too pre posed for my liking but…. I’ll roll with it to see what happens! I’ll keep posting progress of this adventure of fixing Manny’s facial rig!
PS: Im doing a fundraiser to raise money for tools and equipment for those aspiring young artists that want to get into the animation industry here in Puerto Rico. If you want to learn more, theres a button below that will take you to the gofundme campaign.