Facial Rigging Setup: BRINK

Rogue One

Hello Polycount!

I am looking for some advice on facial rigging for games before I start a working on a rig for the BRINK heads I have been working on (Still W.I.P!)




I am building these head with the same topology and am hoping to build a rig that can share the animation data between the heads.I am unsure about a few things and was hoping someone would be able to help out.


- Poly count? What is acceptable these days for game res head? I am thinking around 5-6 tris but I am unsure on this?

- Rig types. From what I can see you have three types:

Bones/Joints
Curve Based
Blendshape

My understanding that Blendshapes and game engines dont get along. Bone/Joints looks to be the most common used from what I can see but I have also came across Curve Based rigs but I am unsure if you can use these in games engines?

I am also looking use mo-cap data and looking for advice how to transfer the rig and animation data from head to head? I am looking to use Faceware plugin for Maya but am open to hearing any other soultions or workflows that are out there!

Any help from you guys would be awesome!

Thanks in advanced.

CheeseOnToast

Don't be so quick to rule out blends. Even the venerable Source engine uses them heavily for facial animation. If you're really into the whole subject, you could do worse than pick up a copy of "Stop Staring : Facial Modeling and Animation Done Right" by Jason Osipa. He covers both bone and blendshape setups, for games and film/TV. It's getting old now, but all the info is still just as relevant.

As for polycount, maybe Mop or Spacemonkey could chime in on this one. At a total guess, I reckon the characters will be somewhere around the 12k to 15K polys in total. I doubt the head would be as dense as 5K polys for an FPS game, but I'd happily be proved wrong.

nekked

Maybe a little heavy, but 5-6k is not crazy for a head that will do a lot of talking and be viewed relatively closely. Could be a lot less 1-2k if its for unimportant/more distant enemy type characters. But it can also go a lot higher for something like an Uncharted main character face as well.

Blendshapes work pretty well too.

Warheart

Hi Rouge One

Blendshapes can actually be cheaper according to a couple of engine programmers I've spoken to. Joints take a lot of data to animate especially if they are using translation as well as rotation.

However I'd imagine it is a lot easier to retarget facial mocap (from normal marker data that you'd get back) onto a joint based facial setup than a blendshape one. If you're going try using some facial mocap then I'd have a look into the process that they suggest.

Edit: Oh yea and as for curve based facial rigs, I've never seen curve based skinning implemented in a game engine (not to say it's never been done but I don't think it's common). I'd guess you could use a curve based rig to drive joints though if you really wanted to use them (I'd imagine it would end up being a bit of a convoluted process doing that though).