WEBVTT

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I will add the armature modifier to the face and as you see as this geometry has all the

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vertex groups that the Victor character had the rig is already working with it quite well

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but anyways I'm going to go into weight painting mode and I'm going to check the weights because

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the shape of the face of this character is very different from Victor so I'm just going to check

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that all the weights are correctly placed over the surface of the model.

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As you see Blend Rig has a bone-based facial rig and although seeing all the deformation bones may

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seem a bit intimidating the actual control of the rig is not hard at all you just have the basic

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controllers for each part of the face you know the mouth the eyelids the eyebrows the nose cheeks

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and then you also have secondary controllers for tweaking the shapes of the different parts a bit

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more but in overall animating the face is very easy.

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you may be wondering how this facial rig works and the truth is that most of the rig moves

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automatically with constraints but there are certain expressions that are achieved with actions

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and as these expressions are achieved with actions it means that the user can modify them to fit their

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own characters. What I'm going to do after checking the weight painting is to start tweaking

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the facial actions of the rig so that they correctly fit the expressions that Vincent needs.

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So here I'm opening the action editor and in the Blend Rig rigging panel you can find the facial

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settings tab. In this tab you will find all the parameters that you need in order to set up how

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the facial rig reacts to the controllers. So what I first do is to establish the movement ranges of

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the controllers and this is not only for setting a limit to the motion of the controllers but this

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also tells the rig that within that limit a specific action will be triggered. So we have

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movement ranges for the eyelids for all the possible directions of motion of the mouth corner

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for the cheeks and for other secondary controllers like the mouth frown and nose frown controllers.

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So I basically start moving the controllers around seeing in which extent I want them to move. When

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I have the correct value I just copy that value into the movement ranges parameters. Once I have

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established all these limits I can move on to editing the actions. There are two basic actions

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in the facial rig that you will always have to edit and that is the eyelids actions and the mouth

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corners inwards movement action. All the rest of the actions let you tweak the deformation of the

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face in certain expressions but the predefined actions that come with the rig may work well

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enough with your character. If they don't you just edit them and fix the issues. Basically in these

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actions you will find that frame zero is the neutral pose and then that the other frames

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perform certain motion. For instance in the upper eyelid section you have frame minus one being

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the upwards motion of the eyelid then frame zero the neutral pose frame one will be the pose with

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the eyelids in the middle of the eyes and then frame two will be the pose with the eyelids at

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the bottom of the eyes and so on with the rest of the actions. All these actions have just a few

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frames that determine these key expressions and you just edit them by going into the action

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and manually tweaking the controllers so you can see in real time how the face of your character

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starts moving around. Still you have to consider that with these actions we are just establishing

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the motion of the bones. In this stage we don't have to take care about the fine details of the

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deformation because we will do that afterwards when we do the key corrective shape keys that

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correspond to each motion. So all you are seeing here is the facial rig working on its own.

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You should also know that in the blend rig rigging panel in the facial setting section you have an

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action toggles tab. With those toggles you can prevent the controllers from triggering the action

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twice when you're editing it. So for instance if I'm going to edit the mouth corner out action

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I turn off the toggle of the mouth corner out. This is because the action is already performing

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the motion and if I move the controller of the rig the action will be triggered once more and

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we do not want that to happen.

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So

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you

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there are also a couple of actions for the body of the character

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which mainly cover the finger spreading actions and also the breathing action of the character.

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So

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in the case of the breathing action I usually do a shape key on the mesh deformed cage of the

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character to better shape the breathing in and out motions of the torso.

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So

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well after finishing setting up the actions all that is left is to model some corrective shape keys

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so that we can fine tune the deformation of the face. In this case as the mesh already had the

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shape keys that Victor had you can see that the list of shape keys is already populated but as I

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didn't want to mess things up I just propagated the basis mesh to all the shape keys in order

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to be able to work from a clean base. So the only advantage of working with Victor's shape keys is

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that the list of shape keys is already there and also the drivers so I had to configure less things.

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So as you see with BlendRig we have a bone-based facial rig that we can configure in a very

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intuitive way and actually most of the facial expressions are achieved by the rig itself.

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With the corrective shape keys all we do is fine-tune in the deformation and add in certain details

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like wrinkles on the front head and stuff like that. I usually start with the shape piece of the

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eyelids because with these shape keys I solve the intersections between the eyelids and the eyeball.

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So I usually work the eyelid motion in two separate shape keys one for when the eyelid

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reaches the middle of the eye and then another one for when the eyelid reaches its maximum position.

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As well as with the actions I basically drive these shape keys with the main controllers of the face

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so I use the mouth control controllers the eyelid controllers and the eyebrows controllers

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to trigger all the different shape keys.

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And needless to say is that I work on the shape keys of one of the sides of the character

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and then I just mirror those shape keys into the opposite side

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and change the controller of the drivers from left to right.

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Here I'm just correcting the deformation of the forehead and adding some wrinkles to it.

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So

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you

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Here I'm just starting to do the shape key for the inwards motion of the lips and it is a good idea

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to enable the matte cap display option with some metal material because with that kind of material

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you can see all the imperfections of the surface of the model so you can do the shape keys and

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correct the irregularities on the surface of the model in a much better way.

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So

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besides of the shape keys that correspond to the main motion of the face

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I usually do other shape keys for achieving other kind of effects on the face.

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So I usually do a shape key for thickening the lips and I also do another shape key

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to make the cheek puff outwards.

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So

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in the same way as when I talked about doing weight painting in extreme poses

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in order to solve problematic deformations better I usually make the facial rig reach extreme

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positions in order to guarantee successful intermediate poses. So as you see I also do

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this shape keys in this extreme poses and then when the face articulates all these different

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shape keys will interact with each other and mix themselves in the intermediate poses.

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So

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here I'm just correcting a bit the action of moving the mouth corner outwards

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.

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So finally, after finishing with the shape piece, I'm going to add a

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corrective smooth modifier to the face just to make sure that everything looks

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smooth when the face moves. Remember that with this modifier you can

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dynamically smooth the model while preserving the details of the

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original geometry, so I'm going to add a new vertex group and I'm going to assign

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it to this modifier and then I'm going to paint the influence of the vertex

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group in the areas where I want the modifier to affect the surface.

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So I go tweaking the influence of the modifier until I get the result that I want.

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.

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And finally, I'm adding a smooth modifier with a vertex weight mix modifier before it

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and with this I will smooth out a bit the mouth corner when it moves.

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So I will paint a vertex group in the mouth corner area and I will assign that vertex

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group to the vertex weight mix modifier and that vertex group will be added to the

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vertex group that is assigned in the smooth modifier. By adding a driver to the influence

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of the vertex weight mix modifier, I achieve this dynamic smoothing effect

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because the modifier only smooths the model when the mouth corner moves.

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.

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Here I'm doing just some final tweaks to the shape keys.

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.

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And here I'm just adding a driver to the viewport visibility property

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of these smooth modifiers so that I can drive it with the deformation extras option that I have

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in the muscle system tab in the blend rig panel. So this way the user can toggle these

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smooth modifiers on and off in order to have a faster viewport display if necessary.

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.

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So I'm done with the face and I will move on to the eyes which again are victor size

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so I will just reassign the armature in the modifiers and fix the drivers that the eye

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objects already have. .

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Then I will go on with the hair and basically I will transfer the weights from the head to the

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hair object. So in the hair object I create the vertex groups that I want to transfer from the

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head. Once I do that I select the head and shift select the hair object and then I go to weight

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painting mode. Then I select the vertex group that I want to transfer and I press the transfer

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weights option. .

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Here I'm just checking the deformation of the hair object and I'm fixing some weights. .

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Now I'm going to add some bones to create some basic rig for controlling the fringe

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that is the hair in front of the head. .

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And here I'm appending some basic eyeglasses rig that I had and I will adjust it to the eyeglasses

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of Vincent and then I will join this rig into Blend Rig and I will weight paint the eyeglasses.

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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.

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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.

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So basically this proxy model uses a low resolution body which comes already weighted with the Blend Rig armature and the face of the high resolution character.

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I then also optimize the geometry by decimating the hair and erasing some faces from the eyes and other secondary objects of the character.

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Once I know the rigging process is finished I uncheck some of the checkboxes of the optimization tabs in the Blend Rig Rigging panel so that I can have a small increment in the playback speed.

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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 corresponding objects to each group.

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So I create the Vincent High group and in the Dupli Visibility options I just check the first layer which is the layer that contains the high resolution model of Vincent.

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That way when I link that group only the Vincent model will show and not the rest of the objects of the rig.

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Then I create the Vincent Low group and in the Dupli Visibility options I just check the second layer which is the layer that contains the proxy model of Vincent.

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So I assign all the corresponding objects to this group too.

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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.

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And as you can see the rig controls both models now.

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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.

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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.

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Well that's it! I hope you have enjoyed this time lapse!

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And if you want more information about how to use Blend Rig you can read the PDF documentation that is available for free on the Blender Cloud or if you want step by step tutorials with much more detailed information about how to set up a character from scratch with Blend Rig.

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Among many other things you can subscribe to the cloud and watch all the training material that I am publishing there which covers everything that I have done here with much more detail.

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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.

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So I am sharing this with you guys and I hope you enjoy using Blend Rig, whether you are an animator or a modeler or someone who just wants to see their characters in motion with high quality results.

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Stay tuned for any update on the project and contact me if you have any doubt!

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See you!

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Thank you!