Skinning and Facial Review/Suggestions

oXYnary

Hello,

Below is my current ideas and progress on a the facial and body rig. I know that not many people here work with facial rigs, but those that do I welcome suggestions of further refinement or adding/grouping certain facial muscle groups.

I probably should say its ideally for UT3 engine, so from what I understand, I cant have more than 3 bone weights per vertex. I don't know if that will mean the rig complexity will have to increase.

I would like the rig capable of showing the 6 basic emotions. So other than talking, it needs to have enough complexity to mimick them all.

While I'm at it, I have a colored view showing my current weighting on the body. If some of you paint your vertices (havent had that much luck with envelopes alone), I again would welcome areas of improvement. I haven't yet gotten to a portion of trying some movement to test the weighting. Mainly because Im working on the head and havent mirrored yet from left to right.

Finally, I have a twist bone in the thigh/femur. I thought this would help with a splayed foot movement. Is that an excess bone I can delete?

Face-Im using Muscle groups/names. Should I have initiated the placement at the muscles insertion versus somewhat in the middle of its movement?


The body showing bone weighting. Left body side is portion worked on.


Thanks.
(thought it would be better to place here since its not really a preview as more technical mumble jumble at this point)

EDIT: Just realized that I have the Triangularis pointing to the wrong bone in the diagram. Thats the root of the tongue by mistake. I hope you still can get an idea.

Mark Dygert

Facial rigs, woo boy thems are the things of my nightmares. =P

I can't wait until Max2008 where it will treat extra bones attached to BiPed as Xtras. Making it possible to save them into a collection, paste poses ect... Its going to be great for this kind of thing. But that's not really going to help you now is it?

I've been developing our character pipeline so we can bring character development back in house, so I'm going thru the same thing you are right now. The only difference being I have the luxury of being able to use Morph Targets for facial animations. I've been looking into moving away from morphs and using a bone set up to cut down on the amount of time we spend making all those morphs.

I have been using a few tools from Di-O-Matic that really help with this kind of thing:
Morph-O-Matic: Helps with the creation of Morph Targets, might not be what you need but it is required for some of the other plug-ins.
Pose-O-Matic: Helps create bone animations based off of morph targets. It's best used for the copy/paste bone poses. Which comes in handy for storing and blending between emotions, and mouth shapes for lip sync.

If you end up doing any lip sync work I suggest reading Preston Blairs write up on Phoneme and I suggest using the Facial Morph Control Script

You might also benefit from the use of a control board? Which works with bones and morphs.

I'm out of time but I'll write up more later...

SkullboX

Is that ben mathis?

Well first of all assign a skin modifier to it and test it out, even with the crappy job skin always does automatically you can easily get an idea of what does and doesn't work at this point.

I personally wouldn't go for an all joint (bone) rig unless it was absolutely necessary. I do use bones extensively in my rigs for the eyebrows, eyelids, jaw and basic lip rotation, but detailed deformation like the mouth is just much easier to get to look right with blendshapes.

As far as your rig goes, I'd make the eyebrow controls in a line following the current 'expression', and use 7 instead of 5 controllers. Even if you only rotate these up and down, you'll have all the control you need. I also doubt the contols of your lip will make the mouth look good considering their pivot is in a very odd location.

Here's the rig I'm currently working with, which has such an eyebrow setup. The head controller (blue line) also contains attributes to control the joints in the eyelids. The jaw controller (yellow line) contrains attributes for the upper and lower lip bones, aswell as attributes for all the mouth blendshapes.







This works really well for me, most of the animation is done with bones and little detail is added to the mouth using blendshapes. Also bear in mind that you need to paint your weights very precisely, envelopes alone definitely won't do it for you.

Good luck!

Ruz

another method which I am finding handy is jusrt to use dummy object linked to the head bone. you jsut weight these to for example the cheek and you just move it around.good for getting refined control over different parts of the face like sneers for example.
I find it easier also to make box like shapes as bones. max's real bones are 'orrible

oXYnary

Unfortunately VIg, its for UT3, which I thought I read was a boned controlled facial system versus just morphs.

As far as Im concerned, your a rigging god Skullbox.
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As far as your rig goes, I'd make the eyebrow controls in a line following the current 'expression', and use 7 instead of 5 controllers. Even if you only rotate these up and down, you'll have all the control you need. I also doubt the contols of your lip will make the mouth look good considering their pivot is in a very odd location.

Here's the rig I'm currently working with, which has such an eyebrow setup. The head controller (blue line) also contains attributes to control the joints in the eyelids. The jaw controller (yellow line) contrains attributes for the upper and lower lip bones, aswell as attributes for all the mouth blendshapes.

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Could you show a quick diagram of what you mean with the eyes?. Yea, I think your right on the mouth. I need a bottom middle orbicularis. Maybe a free standing bone inside the mouth for both the lower and upper lip to "squeeze" the lips together. Normally it would be a child of the middle orbicualis for the upper and lower. That sound plausible?

Mark Dygert

I think for Gears they used FaceFX.

Are you planning on using bone rotation or position to drive the animations?

oXYnary

I dunno.. I guess either/or/both. Its more just to make facial poses versus animation.

SkullboX

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Could you show a quick diagram of what you mean with the eyes?.

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Uuuh, eyebrows, eyelids or the actual eyes. And what kind of 'diagram' are you actually looking for?

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Yea, I think your right on the mouth. I need a bottom middle orbicularis. Maybe a free standing bone inside the mouth for both the lower and upper lip to "squeeze" the lips together. Normally it would be a child of the middle orbicualis for the upper and lower. That sound plausible?

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No, I really have no idea what you're talking about here.

Since you're looking to create an all bone rig, it's quite a bit harder to set up a similar type of control as I described in my previous post. I guess you could do the same thing as I went for, only you'd have to use wire parameters or the link constraint (which used to be horrible slow in max, not sure how bad it is now) to 'weight' the controls of the lips to. The center of both lips as well as the corners are easy, but the controllers inbetween probably would require some kind of expressions/link constraint.

If you want lip squeeze control you'd need one extra bone for each controller on the lip. But seriously ask yourself if you need this, if you can spare the rediculous amount of extra bones for this tiny detail and last but not least if you have time to animate it all. Or you use a single simple blendshape which hardly slows down the rig, is simple to create and will get much better results than you would with extra bones.

I think you're approaching rigging with the wrong mindset, especially since you're working on game characters. You take your limits into account. How many bones can and should you spend on the head, how much time do you have to animate and then you ask how much control (given the limits you already have) you actually need for this particular character. Then for each control you have, you figure out the easiest way to rig it. Right now you're simply looking at what exotic variety of controls you can give your character in a way so it has the same amount of control as an animated film character... using very limited tools.

You're out to pose your character's face rather than animate, then your awnser is blendshapes. If this is more of an excersize in rigging, consider limits, even if they are for an imaginary game, and stay within those boundries. In any case, you can most likely use a combination of blendshapes and bones anyway, for the games you're aiming at. It's easier, faster, and it will look a lot better than just bones using game specs. Apart from that, unless you want to be a TD, no studio will expect you to know how to create an all bone rig that can compete with a bone / blendshape combination anyway, especially at game res.

Besides that your first few organic facial rigs are supposed to suck, as long as you know how to control them. I build my rigs in a way that originated from messing around with the tools a little and making a test lipsync animation. You figure out what you like and what you hate about it and improve it for the next character. I think my rigs kick ass, simply because they are increasingly more fitted to the way I personally like to animate.


The post turned out a little too long. Bottom line, consider your goal, consider your limits, use blendshapes alongside bones and skin it, move on to the next and improve on your failures. Good luck!