What are the new face maps on object data tab?
Can’t find any explanation and video about it. Just a short description on the dev talks. Until now, just managed to use it as a face selecion storage.
If you look on YouTube you will find an addon prototype developed by campell called face map (can’t find it myself but i saw it back whe he released it) . Its basically the same functionality as presto where you can animate by selecting faces on the mesh rather than selecting bones. The face maps are used by rigers instead of helpers bones. There is also a task about it link
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Is it possible to hook them to rigs yet or is that a 2.81 feature?
Yeah, can’t find a way to use it in rigging.
So if I’m reading that correctly then it’s still on the to-do list? So is 2.81 when we are most likely to see it?
Users can then manipulate their rigs just like today, but bones will look as if you are selecting and manipulating the mesh itself.
That sounds marvelous!
I can’t say for sure, but yes, it’s likely that this will be a 2.81 feature.
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Is the asset manager coming around March 2019, approximately? or beyond that?
this is part of this project…so technically it’s planned but taking long time to implement since it’s low priority i guess.
Custom gizmos are already in 2.8. That’s why we have gizmos for the Spin tool and others, for example. Most of the work to support Face Maps in the way described in the task is already done - it’s just the last bits that are needed to make it easy to set up and use for bone selection.
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Depends when the developer develops it 
I certainly hope so - it would be a huge boon.
I think we all understand that with a smaller development team like Blender has some features have to be lower priorities. It’ll be ready when it’s ready.
I understand the development priorities, but why insert the Face Map tools right now if they are incomplete? As far as I know, of course.
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Why does it show if its not working or still in progress? I think there will be tons of questions about this. If its hidden than no questions are asked, thus more time for other stuff
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Is actually this addon? I remember seeing some video of this quite a while back, i believe it was this one.
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Edit: sorry for bumping this thread 2 years later
Brecht just posted this yesterday. Does this mean… no facemaps?
The goal of creating facemaps was to use them for rigging widgets through an addon.
But no official addon demonstrating how to do it was delivered.
So, no addon writer used the feature. And now, Face Maps are currently not really useful.
For mesh modeling, you can make same kind of selection grouping with vertex groups or material slots.
Brecht, here, is just suggesting to abandon the idea of an addon to make the feature directly working by default in a simpler way.
Then, he is just reminding that feature is incomplete and was added to master too early.
That could mean no need to create facemaps to obtain same result for rigging.
So, if you are using facemaps or build an addon around them, you should probably warn the developers. But from what I know, I think that most people don’t really use them at all, currently.
Anyways, a recent comment is more a sign of interest and progress for rigging than a sign of abandon.
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Actually, there’s one addon written using this feature. You can find it here
https://developer.blender.org/diffusion/BAC/browse/master/object_facemap_auto
After you manage to install and activate you have to have at least one Face Map defined (with a face assigned) with the same name of a bone, and works better with bones without parent connected.
Theres two problems:
First - it’s looks like able to change only the position (no scale, no rotation).
Second - the last update happened in 2018 with another one not so useful one in march 2020.
Yes. It is not really a useful addon. In description, there is an explicit warning.
This is currently a proof of concept.