Facerig avatars
polycounter lvl 18
Hello Polycount!
I haven't really done any serious 3d work since around 2007-2008, and when I finished school I didn't have a great portfolio so I wound up spending a lot of time treading water in tech support jobs that didn't especially interest me. I've been doing a lot of commissioned 2d illustration in the last few years, and I've built some good working relationships with regular clients, but I regretted not bringing my 3d skills up to scratch.
After the Facerig beta was released on Steam, a regular client of mine said they and a few of their friends were really interested in having custom avatars made, and I told them I was interested learning how to build avatars for the platform, and so we've worked out an arrangement where they're underwriting my learning process with the workflow - they get their avatars and I get to figure out how to use zbrush and substance painter and how to rig stuff in Maya without having to stress too hard about how bills are gonna get paid.
I probably should have posted this thread earlier in the process than now, but I have this weird idea about needing to bring my stuff up to a Minimum Polycount Standard before asking for help, which I know is kind of dumb. I feel like I could have learned certain valuable lessons the easy way, for example: pose your models with their mouths closed before you export them so they'll be easier to rig, dumbass.
Anyway, here's where I'm at now. Sculpts:
The reason that I sculpted them as head-and-shoulders only is because all of the Facerig demo videos at the time only showed the avatars extending that far - it uses realtime facial motion capture to map the animations, and so I thought I only needed to model to the camera. Turns out that the official avatars have arms and hands and most of them go down to the waist, whoops.
Retopo/unwrap progress:
(yeah I still use silo, fight me)
And I started rigging the bear avatar -
I skipped ahead to the rigging stage after unwrapping it because I wanted to try to get a functioning prototype in the Facerig software as quickly as possible, even if it just has placeholder maps for materials. I figure I can go back and iterate over the materials as much as I want once I have the thing in-engine, but because the hardest and scariest part of the whole pipeline is rigging and skin weighting, I should get a handle on that first and save the texturing dessert for last.
So uh if any of you have useful resources for joint-based facial rigs, please do share. I have the eat3d video on facial rigging for games and have been referring to it constantly, since it's the only thing I could find that features a rig that exactly matches Facerig's requirements.
I haven't really done any serious 3d work since around 2007-2008, and when I finished school I didn't have a great portfolio so I wound up spending a lot of time treading water in tech support jobs that didn't especially interest me. I've been doing a lot of commissioned 2d illustration in the last few years, and I've built some good working relationships with regular clients, but I regretted not bringing my 3d skills up to scratch.
After the Facerig beta was released on Steam, a regular client of mine said they and a few of their friends were really interested in having custom avatars made, and I told them I was interested learning how to build avatars for the platform, and so we've worked out an arrangement where they're underwriting my learning process with the workflow - they get their avatars and I get to figure out how to use zbrush and substance painter and how to rig stuff in Maya without having to stress too hard about how bills are gonna get paid.
I probably should have posted this thread earlier in the process than now, but I have this weird idea about needing to bring my stuff up to a Minimum Polycount Standard before asking for help, which I know is kind of dumb. I feel like I could have learned certain valuable lessons the easy way, for example: pose your models with their mouths closed before you export them so they'll be easier to rig, dumbass.
Anyway, here's where I'm at now. Sculpts:
The reason that I sculpted them as head-and-shoulders only is because all of the Facerig demo videos at the time only showed the avatars extending that far - it uses realtime facial motion capture to map the animations, and so I thought I only needed to model to the camera. Turns out that the official avatars have arms and hands and most of them go down to the waist, whoops.
Retopo/unwrap progress:
(yeah I still use silo, fight me)
And I started rigging the bear avatar -
I skipped ahead to the rigging stage after unwrapping it because I wanted to try to get a functioning prototype in the Facerig software as quickly as possible, even if it just has placeholder maps for materials. I figure I can go back and iterate over the materials as much as I want once I have the thing in-engine, but because the hardest and scariest part of the whole pipeline is rigging and skin weighting, I should get a handle on that first and save the texturing dessert for last.
So uh if any of you have useful resources for joint-based facial rigs, please do share. I have the eat3d video on facial rigging for games and have been referring to it constantly, since it's the only thing I could find that features a rig that exactly matches Facerig's requirements.
Replies
Congrats on the great work!
If you need documentation for creating Facerig avatars you can find everything here:
http://steamcommunity.com/app/274920/discussions/6/
Also you'll find the Facerig Artists support email, don't be shy and contact them.
They will gladly help content creators (: