Is Osipa-style facial rigging outdated?

root

I haven't done any facial rigging in more than five years and I'd like to pick it back up, and Jason Osipa's book Stop Staring was the one I'd used to learn facial rigging. I know tools keep moving and advancing, though, so I'm curious to know if there's a new 'standard' workflow for facial rigging that I need to get up to speed on, and what resources I should be looking at as a starting point.

antweiler

Osipas concepts of the Rig UI and how he breaks down Shapes into "subshapes", are still valid, even if you use bones instead of Blendshapes (as I do). These concepts have of course evolved over time, so I can recommend buying and reading his book.

root

Excellent, thanks!

vargatom

One other thing most people do is to expand the range of shapes/expressions beyond Osipa's set. It's actually pretty good and he can get some amazing results with stylized characters, but as you move to more realistic stuff or even scanned talent, it starts to get limiting. But the general principles are pretty strong and many studios are still relying on them.

With that said, other studios have animators with different preferences. For example both Weta and Naughty Dog guys tend to like to use the Maya channel box instead of the 'joystick' controllers.