hyper real face rigging WIP

#8

giordi, good R&D going on. i would like to see a bit more fall off influence over the joints with proper anatomical deformation. for example when the jaw opens there is slight movements on ear and the temple. anyways R&D will be a hit and run procedure, looking forward to watching the demo on the final rig! keep up the good work :thumbsup:

#9

Great start, keep us posted. This is a place i always refer back to when ever I do facial riggs. Its full of info and a great way of thinking about rigging a face.

#10

yeah i will right now having some troubles skinning the mouth . many bones and also the mesh is damm heavy it will take a lot of fine work to make it working

#11

here i am back from a little vacation and back on my rig .
so after some tests with set driven keys and constraints for driving the main jaw movement i decided to use meshes to drive the controls . What i did is just to pin the control on the mesh with a rivet here some screens of what i got.

#12

joints driven by geometry! cool idea goirdi … quick, simple and effective :thumbsup:

#13

not my idea i saw that while ago i dont remember where . it was used on the lips so i decided to go use it on all the face . i believe nurbs might fit too. also now i can apply blendshape if i wish to. but i still believe SDK might be faster

#14

yes i remember i think i saw a similar looking setup using nurbs geometry to drive joints on one of the rigs from highend3d “CreativeCrash” :slight_smile:

#15

p { margin-bottom: 0.08in; } Isn’t that a little redundant? You skin a peace of geo which drives joints, and then they are skinn a peace of geometry? Why not just skin to joints to the main geo what would be the benefit of the geo that drives the joints?

And the face has a lot of subtle movements, isn’t the geo that drives the joint going to get in the way of the freedom to create those subtle movements? I created that effect for a character that had an armor on his belly, and I needed the armor plates to not fold on them selfs as the character bend over and backwards and side to side. The underlying geo gave me the ability to handle that effect. But for a face? A torso only goes front and back side to side and it twists. A face needs a lot more freedom. Can you explain why you would go down this route?

#16

I think he is using the bones drived by the geo (wich is not the main geo) to be on top of the main deformations produced by the basic joints. This way he has an offset wich will give his rig a great flexibility because after the tipical deformation of the jaw and mouth he has the offset joints following the shape of the mouth, providing a second layer for final refinment.
Maybe i´m wrong, though i think that is the point and that is very usefull.

#17

yes that s exactly what i did. i didnt explain in detail as u did but this is the technique .
And yeah it s pretty flexible

#18

Ohhh ok. I handle that with groups on the joints. It alows me to add math nodes. I can get levels of controls using that route.

Ok, I see where your going, lets see it in auction.

#19

what i did was skin the jaw . getting the deformation i needed with all the little movement i needed and so on the i duplicated the geometry and cut it as i needed . then just copied the skin weight and made the rivet .now when i move the jaw the bones are following the underling geometry so i dont have to mess with all the set driven keys to make the controllers to follow. also a set driven key wouldnt affect both upper jaw and lower jaw as the skin cluster does.
Now that bones are in place i just have to paint the weight and it s done . In the end i will give an offset to those bones so i will get the needed shapes as smile sad so on .

#20

I m gonna do the same . i will use math nodes for driving the expression as i said at the start of the post . i shot a quick example video too. Using this technique doesn’t give any kind of problem i can add as many layer as i want over that .

#21

I don’t think he meant “using meshes” to drive the controls. What he meant is he is using “copy weights” to 'transfer" weighting from a “copy” of the mesh.
I do this all the time with referenced meshes. Copy weights to a duplicated mesh. bam done.
Correct me if I’m wrong.
john

#22

no dude your wrong , what i did was duplicate the mesh then copy the skin weight so i move the jaw those tho mesh match perfectly since they are skinned same way . then on the second mesh i have pinned the controls that are drove from those pieces of geo so the controllers follow perfectly the geo without running into bugging cycles

#23

Nice work Marco. Yea, using another piece of geo to drive joints is something I’ve done in the past with decent results. I worked on a prop for a game asset where I wanted to have piano keys lift off and look cartoony but had to be driven by joints. The effect was pretty cool and looked like sliding skin. A little demo movie of the effect. The basic premise is using re-parameterized nurbs curves that are lofted and driving the deformations with the joint. Never tried this on a face but could be used to add some nice subtle effects.

-Sean

#24

yeah i saw the same effect i believe on farenaith digital tutorial . It s pretty cool but never applied it until now . Might be cool on a face tho maybe around cheek area

#25

Hey Sean long time no speak. For what you have described with the piano keys I would see where the joints on a mesh would work great and the example you posted works great for certain scenarios.
I just think for a face rig math nodes directly on grouped joints would work just as fine and you dont have to add the extra step of skinning and riveting.
Well that is the beauty of maya there are 5 ways to skin a cat. So Marco shows us your technick of how you like to skin a cat. Lol

#26

Sean, that slide thing is great but i didn´t quite understand what you explained. Could you explain it with more detail or maybe provide a link with a tutorial?

@nottoshabi…what you say about groups of joints, if i understand your idea correctly, dont give the same results. Here is an example, check the offset joint, wich is deforming the geo and is driven by the same geo is deforming. Rotate all the joints and see the offset joint position…you say you can do that with math nodes?

#27

JM-art. Why is the offset joint beign driven by the same geo it deforms? There is a thread in here dedicated to facial rigging and it will tell you what I mean about math nodes and grouped joints. It is also a great read.

http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=54&t=20832