Looking for some help-Facial rigging with bones in Maya
After scouring most forums, books, and online resources, it seems that almost all game engines out there do not support facial rigs with blendshapes. They all do on the other hand accept bone rigging for facial rigs. Here is the issue I've been having though, I can't find any tuts online for facial rigging with bones for maya.
Does anyone know of a good resource/book/anything that might at the very least point me in the right direction? I wouldn't expect this to be any different from regular full body methods, but I'd still like to see what people know to know for myself, if that makes any sense.
Does anyone know of a good resource/book/anything that might at the very least point me in the right direction? I wouldn't expect this to be any different from regular full body methods, but I'd still like to see what people know to know for myself, if that makes any sense.
Replies
http://eat3d.com/facialrig
it's maya aswell
Most people myself included strongly dislike animating faces with only bones. Most facial animation isn't done in games unless its by VFX guys which aren't known for rushing out onto the web to release their dark voodoo secrets to the world.
The majority of tutorials are written by people just starting out or who have just enough tricks under their belt to be useful to someone less experienced. The more they get into it and especially after they land a job the less likely they are to write tutorials.
Facial animation in games is still pretty new and normally requires special tools to be written to work in whatever game.
Just like when skeletons started growing fingers and everyone wanted every finger separately rigged and animated, the number of bones on a rig shot way up (from 21 to 72). Adding enough bones to the face to make it worth it, is like adding another full set of hands.
Traditionally Blend Shapes/morphs are much faster and give better results. "Oh but making all those shapes is murder" I do this a lot and a typical set of of morphs 40-70 shapes can be knocked out in a 8hr day. You can easily piss that way trying to get bones to weight and animate smoothly.
Most people will use animate the Blend Shapes and create a bone based rig to read this animation and set keys.
On the surface of the Blend Shape mesh you constrain helper objects on the surface of this mesh. Around the lips, corners of the nose, around the eyes... oh man blinks with bones... a chill just ran down my spine... the horror...
Skin a secondary mesh to a set of bones, and use scripts or manual labor to align the bones to the helper objects as the blend shapes on the face animate.
The result is a bone rig without having to animate with it. The tech monkeys get what they want, a rig without all the overhead of vertex animation.
Check out "Stop Starring" by Jason Osipa also Maya based with some great info on animating as well as setting up and rigging a face.
Good luck! This is some of the hardest stuff for an animator to get right.
Aside from that, it's all setting up test poses and finding the best compromise for distributing the weights around.
Discussing the facial animation rigs and custom tools made in Maya for use in 'The Getaway' on the PS2
The point I made was that blend shapes are easier to animate, and you can set up a bone rig to follow the blends. The advantage of this is that if you're having trouble articulating the face, you can easily crank out a new blend that gives you the motion you're looking for in a few min, without having to fight with the bone rig or make it more complex.
Changing your bone rig could interferer with any animation you've already done, but if all the animation is done in blends its safe from any changes you need to make to your bone rig. You can create/recreate your bone rig at any time with no fear of loosing animation.
This comes in handy later on when they downsize your facial rig trying to optimize the game.
It also gives you the greatest flexablity to test out the placement of different bones.
It also means you can use a bunch of animation scripts that are designed to work with blends, like a lot of lip sync software, like Voice O matic for instance.
@TeZzy Thank you a whole lot for that. Definitely something I'm gonna try to set some cash aside for and try to pick up at some point.
@Vig I can see where you are coming from by saying that it would take a lot longer for setup of a new rig, and how much it limits final animations if something needs to be fixed, however, there is a new tool in 2011 that I think may help cut down that time frame for weight painting. It's called Interactive Skin Binding. What it seems to do (from what I see on their site and what I saw when a teacher was playing with it) is create a sphere or other shape that defines how much of a mesh is influenced by a particular joint. Here is the vid I saw about it.
Thanks for the book suggestion as well. By some chance, that was floating around in the shared Transfer drive at my school last week. I had copied it then but hadn't had a chance to go through it yet.
@Snowfly Oddly enough, I expected needing to do something like that for eyes, some mouth movements, and a few other areas.
@JonMurphy Beaut of an article. Thank you soo much for that. I didn't think to check Gamasutra for articles on how the pros may have facial rigged stuff.