Face Rigging Tutorial Recommendations?

[SidV]

@manuDesk

Do you have example of people successfully using multiple armatures for the face?

No, not for the face but i made a test some time ago, using 2 armatures working togethersplineIK_spine_test.blend. But thats just a control Armature driving a deform Armature.

@manuDesk

How would you copy a pose or select all bones quickly with multiple armatures?

Maybe not so convenient, but you could write simple python selection scripts for that.

@manuDesk

In Blender, in case of shape key editing, you have to go into a zero transform pose and hope you guess right how the modification will look like on the transformed mesh. It is unintuitive and inefficient.

I’m not sure i get your right here but are you aware of these two options?

@manuDesk

There is no proper way of processing weight deformations after shape keys which is a nightmare for me

Not a big fan of corretive shapes and try to avoid them where ever i can. But i have done it and experienced no problems with deformations AFTER shape keys.

@manuDesk

I really don’t like that the vertex groups can’t be layered. Sometimes I have vertex groups only for modifiers but they come in conflict with weighting when normalizing.

Just lock the vertex groups that you dont want to be normalized. In addition you have the option to normalize only deform bones

@manuDesk

Then later I discover the weights are broken only to realize it’s because some vertices aren’t symmetrical…

There is a nifty tool that i use for that.

Weight Paint Tools Documentation

@manuDesk

To resume, I have trouble with weight painting in Blender for many reasons and layering weights like in Maya would be of great help.
That includes stacking active Blendshapes, something i miss a lot from Maya.

And there are a lot of tools i miss from Max when i worked with Maya. Bottomline is, every package has its own way of doing things. Admitted, Blender is far from perfect for Rigging and Animation purposes. Just leave your Maya conecpts in doing things behind and get into the wonderful rigging tools of Blender ( certainly helped me).

@manuDesk

Is there any development going on regarding this? Like having a way to use multiple meshes as active shape key inputs?

There is the Animation2020 poject that got posponed to 2021. The thing is that Blender is implementing the ‘Everything Nodes’ concept so in the future rigging will be done with nodes.