Cerberus rig setup - Facial animation help - duplicate?

[crowhorn52]

I am working on a Cerberus rig for university and initially had the idea to duplicate a rigged head (blendshapes etc… is this even possible- if so, how?!), but as you can see from the image below, the two heads on either side are offset, and the geometry doesn’t match up… I then had the idea of the single head in the middle would be rigged separately and the two side heads would simply be mirrors of eachother and that would cut blendshapes in half, but as they are offset, mirror blendshape scripts do not seem to work as they are not divided by on a particular axis.

Any ideas? Getting a bit stuck with this one! Might be something staring me in the face but have just been working on this for a while and I think it’s draining my soul Any help is so greatly appreciated.

Also, on his mouth, he has some curve boxes that have clusters parented to them so that they can be used independently to create snarl shapes… How do I go about parenting them to follow my head joint so that they do not lose their influence properties or go crazy with their relativity if this makes sense? Finding it hard to get a lot of info about the visual side of rigging!

Thank you
Anna

[Emorfer]

My first thought is if you were to rig the head as a separate object from the body, you could just import three versions of the rigged stand-alone head, then attach the vertices to the body. as long as you don’t delete the history on the combined shape the blend shapes will remain.

I’m sure you could also write a tool as you manually rig the one face, and just run it to set up the other two…depending on your scripting chops.

Once you get all the heads together, I would also suggest making another GUI that allows you to control some or all of the heads at once. Could be a cool thing to play with.

Hope this helps!

[crowhorn52]

My first thought is if you were to rig the head as a separate object from the body, you could just import three versions of the rigged stand-alone head, then attach the vertices to the body. as long as you don’t delete the history on the combined shape the blend shapes will remain.

I’m sure you could also write a tool as you manually rig the one face, and just run it to set up the other two…depending on your scripting chops.

Once you get all the heads together, I would also suggest making another GUI that allows you to control some or all of the heads at once. Could be a cool thing to play with.

Hope this helps!

Thank you!! Importing the three versions seems to have done the trick I will be working on a GUI and a universal control was something I was thinking of, but unsure how to map it, especially with each head already having its own control it could get overcrowded unless I figured out a way to switch between the two. Definitely worth thinking about though

[Emorfer]

Glad it worked out for you! Good luck on the GUI design…should be a nice challenging task to create intricate controls while adhering to good HCI principles.

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