I’m working on creating a character, and I have some questions based on my experience making various stylized characters. Specifically, how should I design the default facial expression to minimize issues with rigging, weight painting, and texture resolution loss in certain areas when posing?
When I create characters, I usually don’t start with a neutral expression. Instead, I imagine them with a slightly bright expression—lips gently closed in a subtle smile and eyes wide open. This doesn’t cause problems during sculpting, but after rigging and texturing, I often encounter issues when changing facial expressions, especially around the eyelids and lips.
Have you ever experienced similar problems? If so, how did you solve them?
For rigging you need the most neutral expression and pose.
A pretty bored face and a T pose generally works well !
For the eyes I recently tried to do them closed, so the rig only opens them, reducing the stretching in the eyelids.
But I’ve also see some people doing semi-closed eyelids ( 50% open / 50% closed), and many people tend to do nearly fully open eyes.
But since it’s much easier to rig the mouth closed, having the same for the eyes makes sense.
Of course bored face and T pose is what’s needed for rigging, but it’s very difficult to judge the character with it. We don’t expect clients to sign off a model in a pose like that. And if you’re creating a character, working in neutral if difficult too.
In a professional environment a character is made in two steps. The concept phase is where character is drawn or sculpted with expressions.
Then after that some character sheet are made for the final model and they are built in a neutral pose.
When working alone, you should make a neutral pose before rigging, or model neutral but add some shape keys to add temp expressions if you want to better feel the character.
In general I think having the eyes mostly open is OK for rigging the eyelids (you still of course need the edge loops and smooth out the weight painting so it all looks OK deformed when one closes the eye, especially the top eyelid, which in most cases is the one that moves the most).
However, then for texture painting, I will close up the eye in the UV map (again, usually the top eyelid the most), so that there is more pixel information over the eyelids and hence more detail and way less stretching of the image.
Not so much a big deal with fast eye blinks and the camera at a bit of a distance, but if you ever have a close-up shot and it starts or has the eyes closed for a bit of time, then it could be an issue.
Having the eye closed as default pose made a bit easier to get those poses.
In rig and eventually in animation.
The general rule is that we tend to rig with the mouth closed as it generally needs to deform a lot, therefore closed is simpler to work with.
For some cartoony characters the eyes might need to deform much more than a realistic or semi-realistic character, then having eyes closed might be a good option to consider.
And anyway, even if you don’t follow these rules you can manage something , it’s just a bit more convenient !