and we'll add the armature modifier to the face
and as you see as this geometry has all the verdicts groups that
the victor character had the rig is already working with it quite well.
But anyways,
I'm going to go into weight painting mode and I'm going to check the weight
because the shape of the face of this character is very different from victor.
So I'm just going to check that all the weights
are correctly placed over the surface of the model.
As you see,
blend rig has a bone based facial rig and although
seeing all the deformation bones may seem a bit intimidating,
the actual control of the rig is not hard at all.
You just have the basic controllers for each part of the face, you know the mouth,
the eyelids,
the eyebrows,
the nose cheeks. And then you also have secondary controllers for tweaking
the shape of the different parts a bit more.
But in overall animating the face is very easy.
You may be wondering how this facial rig works
and the truth is that most of the rig moves automatically
with constraints but there are certain expressions that are achieved with actions
and as these expressions are achieved with actions.
It means that the user can modify them to feed their own characters.
What I'm going to do after checking the weight painting
is to start tweaking the facial actions of the rig
so that they correctly fit the expressions that Vincent needs.
So here I'm opening the action editor and in the blend rig rigging panel,
you can find the facial settings tab in this step you will find all the parameters
that you need in order to set up how the facial rig reacts to the controllers.
So what I first do is to establish the movement ranges of the controllers.
And this is not only for setting a limit to the motion of the controllers but
this also tells the rig that within that limit a specific action will be triggered.
So we have movement ranges for the eyelids for
all the possible directions of motion of the mouth,
corner for the cheeks
and for other secondary controllers like the
mouth frown and knows frown controllers.
So I basically start moving the controllers around seeing in which extent
I want them to move when I have the correct value.
I just copy that value into the movement range of parameters.
Once I have established all these limits I can move on to editing the actions.
There are two basic actions in the facial rig that you will always
have to edit and that is the eyelids actions and the mouth corners,
inwards movement.
Action all the rest of the actions.
Let you trick the deformation of the face in certain expressions.
But the predefined actions that come with the
rig may work well enough with your character
if they don't you just added them and fix the issues
basically in the sections you will find that frame zero is the
neutral post and then that the other frames perform certain motion.
For instance in the upper eyelids action you have frame minus one being
the upwards motion of the eyelid. Then frame zero. The neutral post.
Frame one will be the post with the islets in the middle of the ice and
then frame two will be the post with the eyelets at the bottom of the ice
and so on with the rest of the actions.
All these actions have just a few frames that determine this
key expressions and you just edit them by going into the
action and manually tweaking the controllers so you can see in
real time how the face of your character starts moving around.
Still you have to consider that with these actions we are just establishing
the motion of the bones in this stage we don't have to take care
about the fine details of the deformation because we will do that afterwards
when we do the key corrective shape keys that correspond to each motion.
So all you're seeing here is the facial rig working on its own.
You should also know that in the blended rigging panel
in the facial setting section you have an action total step
with those toggles.
You can prevent the controllers from triggering
the action twice when you're editing it.
So for instance if I'm going to edit
the mouth corner out action.
I turn off the toggle of the mouth,
corner out this is because the action is already performing the
motion and if I move the controller of the rig,
the action will be triggered once more and we do not want that to happen.
There are also a couple of actions for the body of the character which
mainly cover the fingers spreading actions and
also the breathing action of the character.
In the case of the breathing action,
I usually do a shaky on the Mr form cage of the
character to better shape the breathing in and out motions of the torso
well after finishing setting up the actions,
all that is left is to model some corrective shape keys
so that we can fine tune the deformation of the face
in this case as the mesh already had the shape is that victor had.
You can see that the list of shape keys is already populated.
But as I didn't want to mess things up,
I just propagated the basis mesh to all the shape keys
in order to be able to work from a clean base.
So the only advantage of working with victor's shape keys is that
the list of shape cases already there and also the drivers.
So I had to configure less things.
So as you see with glenn we we have a bone based
facial rig that we can configure in a very intuitive way.
And actually most of the facial expressions are achieved
by the rig itself with the corrective shape keys.
All we do is fine tuning the deformation and adding certain
details like wrinkles on the front head and stuff like that.
I usually start with the shape piece of the eyelids because with this
shape keys I solve the intersections between the eyelids and the eyeball.
So I usually work the eyelid motion in two separate shape keys,
one for when the island,
which is the middle of the eye and then
another one for when the eyelid reaches its maximum position
as well as with the actions.
I basically drive these shape keys with the main controllers of the face.
So I use the mouth control controllers,
the eyelid controllers and the eyebrows controllers
to trigger all the different shape keys
and needless to say is that I work on the shape keys of one of the size of the character.
And then I just mirrored those shape keys into the opposite
side and changed the controller of the drivers from left to right
here.
I am just correcting the deformation of the forehead and adding some wrinkles to it
here. I'm just starting to do the shaky for the inwards motion of the leaps
and it is a good idea to enable
the madcap display option with some metal material because
with that kind of material you can see all
the imperfections of the surface of the model.
So you can do the shape kids and correct the irregularities
on the surface of the model in a much better way
besides of the shape keys that correspond to the main motion of the face.
I usually do our shape keys for achieving other kind of effects on the face.
So I usually do a shaky for thickening the lips.
And I also do another shape key to make the chick puff outwards
in the same way as when I talked about doing weight painting in extreme poses.
In order to solve problematic deformation is better.
I usually make the facial rig reach extreme
positions in order to guarantee successful intermediate poses.
So as you see, I also do these shape keys in this extreme pulses.
And then when the face articulates all these different shape kiss
will interact with each other and mix themselves in the intermediate poses
here. I am just correcting a bit the action of moving the mouth corner outwards.
So finally,
after finishing with the shape is I'm going to add a corrective smooth modifier to
the face just to make sure that everything looks smooth when the face moves.
Remember that with this modifier you can dynamically smooth the
model while preserving the details of the original geometry.
So I'm going to add a new verdicts group and
I'm going to sign it to this modifier And then I'm
going to paint the influence of the verdicts group in
the areas where I want the modifier to affect the surface
So I go tweaking the influence of the modifier until I get the results that I want.
And finally I met in a smooth modifier with a vertex weight mix modifier before it.
And with this I will smooth out bit the mouth corner when it moves.
So I will paint a verdict group in the mouth corner area and
I will assign that verdicts group to the verdicts weight mix modifier.
And that verdict group will be added
to the verdicts group. That is assigned in the smooth modifier
by adding a driver to the influence of the verdicts weight mix modifier.
I achieved this dynamic smoothing effect because the
modifier only smooth small when the mouth corner moves
here I am doing just some final tweaks to the shape keys
and here I'm just adding a driver to the view
port visibility property of this smooth modifiers so that I can
drive it with the deformation extras option that I have
in the muscle system tab in the blend rick panel.
So this way the user can toggle this smooth modifiers on and
off in order to have a faster BUE poor display if necessary.
So I'm done with the face and I will move on to the ice which again are victor size so
I will just reassign the armature in the modifiers and
fix the drivers that the eye objects already have.
Then I will go on with the hair and basically I
will transfer the weight from the head to the hair object.
So in the hair object I create the verdicts groups that I want to
transfer from the head Once I do that I select the head and shift,
select the hair object and then I go to wait painting mode.
Then I select the verdicts group that I want
to transfer and I press the transfer weights option
here.
I'm just checking the deformation of the hair object and I'm fixing some weights.
Now I'm going to add some bones to create some basic rig
for controlling the fringe that is the hair in front of the head
and here I am a pending some basic eyeglasses rick that I had and I will adjust it to the
eyeglasses of Vincent and then I will join this rig
into blend rig and I will wait paint the eyeglasses.
So we are getting to the end of this and I'm
going to adjust the latest objects that come with blend rig.
And then I'm going to assign some latticed modifiers to
the character in order for the lattices to affect it
basically the lattices that are generated with the rig. Our salaries for the head
salaries for the mouth, which makes the motion of the mouth much more organic.
Then we also have a lattice for the eyebrows
and for the ice. And that will let you achieve some nice Tooni effects with the ice.
And finally we also have a lattice for the body of the character
which lets you move the chest or the belly of the character.
All these lattices are already related to the blundering
amateur so they move out of the box.
One of the final steps before this character
is production ready is to create a low resolution
proxy version of the character so that we can
have a faster view for playback for that.
I use the low resolution body mesh that comes with blend rig.
So I make that mesh fit the shape of the
character and then I basically duplicate the head of the character
and I take it to the layer where the proxy model is.
So basically this proxy model uses a low resolution
body which comes already waited with the blend regar mature
and the face of the high resolution character.
I then also optimized geometry by decimating the hair and erasing some
faces from the eyes and other secondary objects of the character.
Then I arrange a bit better the bone shapes of the armature.
So I go to the layer where these shape objects are and I added
the necessary objects so that the controllers
are above the surface of the character.
And we don't need to use the X ray option
Once I know the reading process is finished and
checked some of the check boxes of the optimization
taps in the blender grading panel so that I
can have a small increments in the playback speed
and then all that is left to share this
character and to use it in a production environment is
to create the high resolution group and the low resolution
group and assign the correspondent objects to each group.
So I create the Vincent high group and in the deeply visibility options
I just check the first layer which is the layer that contains the high
resolution model of Vincent that way when I link that group only the Vincent
model will show and not the rest of the objects of the rig.
Then I create the Vincent law group and in the do plea visibility options I just
check the second layer which is the layer that contains the proxy model of Vincent.
So I assigned all the correspondent objects to this group too.
And we're done.
Now if I open a new blend file, I can link both groups
and then I can do make proxy and select the Vincent blend rig
rig from there and that will bring the rig to the scene.
And as you can see the rig controls both models now.
So then you can split up the models into different layers.
So we put the high resolution Vincent in one layer
and the low resolution Vincent in another layer and we
can toggle the layers to decide which group we want
to see depending on the performance that we need.
Also,
once you have all the subjects in the scene you can delete one of the groups and
if you select the remaining group you can switch from that group to the other group.
From the group option. In the duplication tab of the object panel.
Well that's it.
I hope you have enjoyed this time lapse.
And if you want more information about how to use blend rick you
can read pdf documentation that is available for free on the blender cloud
or if you want a step by step tutorials with much more detailed
information about how to set up a character from scratch with blend rig.
Among many other things,
you can subscribe to the cloud and watch all the training material that I am
publishing their which covers everything that I
have done here with much more detail.
I created blend rig to skip all the technical stuff about rigging and
to concentrate on the artistic part of creating a character for animation.
So I'm sharing this with you guys And I hope you enjoy using blend read whether you
are an animator or a modeler or someone who
just wants to see their characters in motion.
With high quality results.
Stay tuned for any update on the project and contact me. We have any doubt.
See you.
Yeah.