Technical Journal Week 3 - Facial Rigging

Different approach to Facial Rigging


 If you are interested in rigging stylized animation or for games, you might want to check out Judd Simantov.


Here's his reel,

As for facial rigging I am also looking into his tutorials for my RnD project as I plan to combine his method of rigging into mine, if that is even possible. But before I talk about mine, lets look more into how Judd Simantov preferred way of doing his.

In this image from a video, he explains how joint placements on facial rigging affects skinning.
Basically how this works is that he place joints at different parts of the face where anatomically affects the facial expression. Through the use of joints he skins them to different parts of the face where it affects a portion of the area. With this, he can form any facial expression and set a switch to activate them. Note that the circle dots on his face are joints.

Here are some of the examples he did through this method of rigging. Pretty effective huh. As I mentioned before about the switch, his way of doing it is using a set of curves to set up a switch to activate them. Like example 3 joints moving the eyebrow and etc.

As you can see, the set of curves in red that was set up beside Tarzan is the switch. When you select each individual curves that represents that part of the face you want to control, a list is shown at the channel box where the switches creates different forms of facial shapes. From there, you will be able to create huge variations of facial expression. In the video he explains, this approach is effective due to the results of advantages it can produce when forming a very cartoon Disney like animation, such as the exaggeration of facial expressions. How this is done by first using the switch to form an expression, and then further moving the individual joints to tweak them. Judd's way is what you would call Facial Rigging With Joints.

Now that you have a basic understanding of Judd's way of facial rigging, here's mine. As shown, the way I did was somewhat similar to his. Having a set of curves to control my character's expression. However, mine actually works very differently. Each curve I move represents how I would form the face, and my set of curves which are called a U.I doesn't have a switch at all. This way of rigging is commonly known as Facial Rigging With Blendshapes. Now you may think, isn't this so much easier to form facial expressions?

If you would to look at a visual point of view, Yes! However, there are many restrictions to this method. First of all, you can't tweak the expressions like Judd's method. In other words, you can't exaggerate facial forms as well.


Therefore, for my RnD project I am looking ways to combine both methods or maybe a mod version of Judd's method. This may take some time!