Very cool! I enjoyed fooling around with it - seems pretty flexible! Everything is great except it’s a little difficult to create smaller mouth positions. I was trying to make an Ooo sound/mouth-shape and was having a little difficulty.
I was trying to make an Ooo sound/mouth-shape and was having a little difficulty.
That true… but I “un-hided” some of the bones so you can actually see what the grey bones do. Should be easier to form shapes now.
So pretty much you need to bring the IK.L.001 and IK.R.001 close in the center… and move them forward a bit from the side view, because they go inside the teeth.
The only reason why I would use a shapekey would be because I cannot accomplish the same task with armature. If you can get something to work with Armature you have far more control while animating.
My goal is to try create a mouth rig which would allow me to do lip-sync.
I got a few characters whose mouths were done using bones, but not in this way. I’ve got to say that this way seems to be better, as with the other way, I’ve had a few cases where things were not deforming at all, or deforming in bad ways.
Is there a blend file for this? Also how are you weight painting the face? The IK targets look like they are almost in the right positions of where the muscles attach. I keep hearing that bones are more flexible, why? Do they allow easier animation arcs? Btw you may want to learn the names of the muscles. This would be an ideal way of naming the Ik targets.
I was going to rig the cheeks… but then decided that the movement was so simple that it would save time to simply create shapekeys and make the exisiting IK bones act as the drivers, when a bone approaches a certian location.
I’m not using weight paint, just Assigning the vertices to bones at 1.00. Key is to get rid of all the unneeded vertices. It’s suprising what you can get with subsurf.
I keep hearing that bones are more flexible, why?
When you create shape keys you don’t have that much control as in tweaking that “o” shapekey when the character is surprised for example… you have to create a new shapekey (or combine then with others) But if you are able to achieve these shapes with armature, you can easily tweak the shape around, as your character goes under different moods.
Alot of it has to do with the IKJaw Bone. The two IK bones on the side corners are effected by the Jaw bone, the bottom IK bone is effected by the Jaw bone. Also the bottom IK bone grabs onto the ends of the two chains.
And then we have the four other IK bones which help adjust the shape.
ALSO, if you look into the edit mode you’ll notice that all those yellow bones have a duplicate which copies the location of and stretches to the next bone. The reason behind this is that the Stretch within the bones not only effect the bone but also scales the vertices. These duplciates don’t have the “stretch” input, but use the stretch to constriant. The vertices are assigned to these bones and they don’t scale BUT only stretch when the yellow bones stretch.
Back to the Jaw, the two IK bones on the side, are not the REAL IK bones. These are the bones that the real IK bones (switch are hidden) copy 50% location of. The reason behind this is that I didn’t want the Jaw bone to be the 100% parent, I want it to sort of pull on them.
Yes I am using 2.42… but before posting the file I go into 2.41 and hide the bones which are actually in a different layer since most peoples don’t have 2.42 yet and I don’t want to freak anyone out…
Oh, and why are you using a seperate Armature for the eyelids?
I did something similar in max some time ago not as advanced though, this is nice the only difference is that the initial mouth bones were easy to place in max as all that was necessary was copying an edgeloop from the mouth and converting to bones but I will try this in blender again though, thanks
I was going to, but since I’m rigging this character for a movie we are working on, at blenderprojects and since we don’t need this kind of control in the eye area, I’m going to resort to shapekeys. But I might do it later.
Yea, that would’ve been easier. But to place my bones I simply snapped my bones to the vertices.
I noticed in the previous versions, that if I rotated the neck or head from a side view that the bones were not rotating in one plane, or it seemed like they were “IK hunting”. At first I thought maybe it was the track-to the eye target influencing the head?
The duplicates I talked about in post 11, were not parented. So even though they did copy the location/stretch to next bone, their rotation remained the same. When you rotate the head, the mouth moves around a bit, so after hours sitting trying to figure out what the heck was wrong, I finally figured it out “Parent the duplicates to the head.”
I usally wait for a reply, to reply back to before posting a update… after waiting a day decided to go ahead and post anyways.
Been experimenting with cheek shapekeys… http://www.blenderprojects.com/calvin/victest9.blend
Did you create the body-mesh from scratch? … or modify Ludwig’s mesh?
There is a problem with the interaction of the brows and the eyelids. The eyelids, especially the left one for some reason, are tearing over the eyeball, with even only moderately “down positions” of the eyebrows.
