Summary

This was the fourth specialization project I made during my time at TGA, which I spent four weeks working on. Once again I wanted to challenge myself even further, to make something I had not done before, I had rigged a lot of human characters at this point, but I had yet to make a face rig.

Instead of rigging the face of a realistic character, I found it more interesting to use a face which is a lot more stylized, reminiscent of a lot animated movies I have seen over the years. I found this character model by IndieArt and since I liked the look of it, I decided to use it for my project.

Generally there are two ways to go about making face rigs, either you control the face with joints or you use blendshapes to deform the model the way you want it to. Both ways have their own advantages/disadvantages and have different challenges to overcome, however in the end I decided to go with joints, since it is more cheap to use in game engines.

As with any other rig a lot of research and planning was needed for the project, the main challenges were to make the mouth and the eyes work as I wanted them to. The way I decided to go about it was to make a set of deformation controls in the eye lids and used set driven keys to make them behave like I wanted to, so that the eyelids move a tiny bit when the characters eyes move, or fully close when I wanted them to. For the mouth I used aim constraints to make the lips move accordingly when the character opens her mouth.