Special Facial Rigging

[floatingworld]

There is a book called stop staring by jason osipa that decribes setting up spline controls on the face and using opposing blend shapes. He has written a script for this in MEL. In max, these spline controls would be linked to reaction manager in such a way that their movement would add or subtract from some morph target. There is a short tutorial out there regarding this, and there is also paul neales excellent dvd on facial animation u can get at cg academy. As for a maxscript that sets these controls up automatically once you have constructed all the morph targets, there is only one I know of - the one I wrote 3 years ago and posted on scritpspot under 'facial animation'. The sample file there is rough and the morph targets r crap and is only a proof of concept but the script works on properly set up meshes and has all the attributes of the - now standard-Osipa rig for facial morph control. Don't forget however, to make sure you rename the PEN atribute holder and to run the eye rig script first for initial setup. You must also have all the required morphs set up and named properly according to the naming convention as set out in the script comments.

If you don't know any maxscript, you will have trouble understanding what is going on in the script, but basically it is based on the connection between the splines and Reaction manager, which in turn controls the morph targets. There are other connections which use param wiring but reaction manager ismainly used because of the 'opposing' morph requirment, which is a tricky concept but Paul neale explains it well, and there is also a good easy-to-follow concise tute on this concept somewhere but I don't have the link right here and now. The core of my script is the connectmorphs function, which takes arguments related to the morphs and spline controls and attributes. Understand this, and you can understand the whole thing more or less. The spline controls themselves of course can be any shape and could even be placed on the face itself but I find this confusing.
I suggest you buy Osipas book, then check out the short tutorial on opposing morphs, perhaps get pauls dvd on facial animation(but this is overkill really) and then
you should start by wiring up just one spline to a morph target using reaction manager manually. You will soon find that doing this for all the controls needed is a tedious task obviously requiring a script. Fortunately, I have done the donkey work for you and have written the script already. let me know how it goes. If you want the commercial version of my script which has screenshot poses and a more complete UI, let me know. It is reasonably priced./

[Carlos]

Thank you floatingworld,

I will give it a try with Osipas book, if I can't figure it out I will contact you.

Thanks

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