It’s happening! At Blender Studio, we’ve begun developing a new, production-ready character asset: Storm. This project is primarily focused on designing an artist-friendly facial rig, where expressions and deformations are carefully sculpted and integrated into a non-destructive workflow.

Our goal is to create a high-quality character rig that meets today’s industry standards, fully prepared for animation and lighting. With this approach, we aim to make the facial rig more intuitive for animators, allowing expressions to be easily posed using predesigned deformations, while still offering the flexibility to tweak and adjust as needed. This will help animators stay on model and achieve facial appeal more efficiently. Ultimately, we believe this will make animating not only faster but a lot more fun!

The Process

Before starting the actual rigging of this character, we went through a substantial prototyping phase. Early on, I proposed a workflow outlined in the Facial Rigging with Shape Keys article. Many of you responded positively and expressed interest in a tutorial explaining how to implement this specific approach.

At the studio, we felt it was important to first create our own character. This would serve as a proof of concept and give us the opportunity to refine and improve the workflow as the project develops, before sharing it publicly.

Over the past few months, I’ve had the chance to speak with several riggers working in the industry. These conversations provided valuable insights, tips and perspectives on the possibilities of facial rigging and the techniques commonly used in major animation studios. They also helped me understand that there is rarely a single perfect solution. The right approach often depends on the character style, the production pipeline, and even personal preferences. With the knowledge gathered from these discussions and our own prototyping efforts, I’ve made a number of adjustments to the facial rig. In some areas, using bones turned out to be more flexible and reliable in achieving the level of quality we’re aiming for.

The concept art of the character has been made by Vivien Lulkowski and Julien Kaspar in collaboration with me (Rik Schutte), leading the project, resulting in a charming young character called ‘Storm’. Expression sheets and sculpts are provided as a guide to engineer the facial rig where it can confidently strike these poses.

Tooling

For this project, I’ve been working closely with our Blender developers to introduce new tools and improve existing ones in order to support the intended workflow. As a result, a variety of tools and operators will be used to make this rig function effectively.

During the prototyping phase, I also created several custom scripts to streamline my own workflow. These include enhanced shape key operators, improvements to weight painting, and driver automation features. Each of these tools will be explained in more detail as the project progresses and as they become relevant to the development process.

A big component of this workflow is the use of 'Override Transforms'. This feature has been updated with new functionality that allows to attach control bones to vertices and update the gizmo to their visual location. This means control bones follow any mesh deformation and can be manipulated without creating dependency cycles.

Challenges

As an animator first and foremost, I have a clear vision of how I want the character to perform and move. However, I am not yet highly experienced in character rigging. I have gained useful knowledge and hands-on practice over the course of my career, especially in recent months, but I have not previously completed and released a fully rigged character.

Thankfully, I have the support of Demeter Dzadik, who will be assisting and guiding me throughout this project. While I focus on developing the facial rig, Demeter will be working on the body rig using his Cloud Rig add-on, which is available through Blender’s extensions platform. Merging the facial and body rigs, and coordinating our work, will require additional tools and clear communication. We hope that by combining the strengths of an animator and a rigger, we can create a character rig that is both technically strong and enjoyable to animate.

The progress of this project will be shared through weekly production logs, where I will explain the steps I take and the decisions behind them. Please note that these updates are not intended to be a full tutorial, as we are still refining the workflow. However, they are meant to offer insight into the process as it unfolds. In the future we're planning on doing a full course on this type of facial rigging on blender.studio.org. More updates will follow soon!

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