hi…
I want to setup a face rig system as given in this page in blender. Is it possible…
And some other references using this system:
http://www.highend3d.com/maya/tutorials/character/Facial-Animation-Rig-for-Delgo-276.html
Hi !
Maybe if you put a .blend file will help us more.
Thank you !
hey…
it was done in 3dsmax and maya… not in blender… i want to impliment same kind of face rig in blender… the rig is like following topology of the face to get around 80 combination for character face animation… hope i am clear… 
lol ! you have maya and another stuff and you will learn blender , is so funny .
And the first step is this problem , so realy want you create some flame topic ?
mohanohi: Wow, nice rig idea! Yeah, it should definitely be possible. Good luck.
Back in my Maya days I found the Delgo tutorial to be one of the better rigging tutorials out there.
If you’ve got Maya, check out my now-dusty auto-rigging script, which includes auto-rigging for faces. http://oscarts.org/rigging.html You’ve still gotta do the painful weight painting yourself 
Since Blender’s going to have a macro recorder in 2.5 (and therefore short-bus coders such as myself can Copy/Paste our way to victory) I had considered recreating my auto-rigging script for Blender, although I’d need to find the time first.
The only reason this is a ‘flame topic’ is because you’re trolling…
Just skimmed over the link but if you can get curves to control empties (no clue if this works) then you could probably parent an empty to a vert, curve point to the empty and a bone to the curve to control everything.
A much easier way would be to use a face cage inside of a mesh deform modifier cage to do away with all the complications but get the same effect. BlenRig 2.0 I believe does this – no link but not too hard to find with the forum search function.
I might have to see if I can get the method from the link to work in blender with empties and curves just for something to do.
Uncle Entity : yeah… i was trying the empty and curve method… but without any success… But still trying… I have done bone and shape based face rig for my character… Wanna try this method… And i think this method evolved in discussions in cgsociety forums by Mr. EEK : http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=54&t=20832
mythcat : I am not a maya user, if i was then i could have easily understood the concept and method of rig provided in those page… Pls first try to understand the meaning of my post… It would be really great if this method of face rig followed in production… You will get great amount of flexibility and variety of facial expressions…
In words of eek from cgsociety:
Ive plaved with Morphs and bones, and they dont seem to give me total control i want , at the minute im working on a system based on muscles where by you have main controls on the jaw and corners of the mouth, but also controls of parts of the lips. So e.g you can pull a oww shape, and then pull corners of the mouth to give it grimmus! in the viewport live on the fly, you can give instant changes. When its all finished ill post a version. Its based on musles of the face, and works really well!, and feels like skin.
Eek
Character Framework TD
(stills some bugs though mainly the Pukka control!)
Hi mohanohi,
I guess this is not so easy to implement in Blender. I also tried to implement this approach in Blender but was not too happy with the result. Better is to use bones directly and very careful weight painting.
In Blender you may try following modifiers (deformers) for face rig that could help you:
- lattices
- meshdeform
Curves are very tricky and strange deformer in Blender and unfortunately not suitable for face rig. Problem is that in Blender there is not even simple cluster deformer like in Maya. So I guess better way is to follow these approaches using bones:
http://www.bradnoble.net/rigging/facial_bone_rig.html
http://www.vimeo.com/3077609
http://www.vimeo.com/4440743
http://www.vimeo.com/2910555
To replicate Maya clusters in blender, you can simply use two armatures. The bones of the first one in the stack would be the clusters. Not shure this is what you ment, but it is very powerful anyhow.
About the curves: I investigated a little bit further and figured out something i was not aware of: If you set the PathLen and the speed curves to values from 0 to 1, you can use the offset value of the constraint to place multiple obejcts statically. See mysample blend file: . To make it work with Armatures you have to jump through hoops though. Curve points are controlled by hooks, the hooks are controlled by a second armature. Have fun!
Loolarge, this is really interesting file for the first look. I will test it later.
mohanohi, definitely hooks are also worth to try. But you really got the point - unfortunately we cannot weight paint their influence so I guess they are not really useful for detail face rigging.
Maybe the best solution would be to model the very simple “cage head” with the proper deforming curves you want. And use this deforming head as a meshdeform modifier for your detail head which face is to be animated. The meshdeform head could be controlled by an armature or hooks etc. This may be the way to achieve XSI method you have mentioned with Blender tools.
wow thanx Loolarge: i think… this is it… will try now…
JiriH: I will try your method… thanx for the advice