A nice facial animation rig

[OlaHaldor]

I came across this on a norwegian forum. He's a Maya artist.. I'm no character animation kind of guy, but this really made it tingle between the ears. Wonder what possibilities there is for LW?


http://youtube.com/watch?v=69L0Bm7iJpM
http://youtube.com/watch?v=vz9620TTlOs

[wrightyp100]

This looks ace. Any awesome riggers out there? I use simple rigger so you can see my lack of skill in that dept. ;)

[RebelHill]

u can do much the same stuff in LW... my tutorials cover facial rigging like this, a basic version in the free stuff.

The only difference is the control points for dragging the lips around. In LW the only option you've got for such things is joints, which have their limitations deform control wise... things you see like that done in maya are done with clusters, for which there's no equivolent in LW.

[ericsmith]

Out of curiosity, how exactly do clusters work? I've heard the term many times, but never actually seen them in action. I've basically assumed it was a group of points, possibly weighted for varying strength, that could be grouped and tied to the translation of a null. Is that it, or is there more to it?

Eric

[RebelHill]

A cluster is basically just a grouping/collection of points... none too different to other kinds of vertex mapping really. You can however cross weight between clusters so as deforms belnd into each other more smoothly... create blend shapes on a per cluster basis, or have a whole mesh belndshape, and only apply it to certain areas of the mesh using the clusters or cluster weights.

So, yeah, I s'pose you can setup similar things with LW using weights and morfs, and using nulls to tie them all together with the weights isolating, and blending into/out of the morf as per the weights... but yikes... way to much messing for my liking, especially given the way that LWs morphs blend additvely on top of one another, etc.

its also much more useful in maya due to the fact that you can rig up a very rough control setup using clusters on one mesh, and then use that to drive the deformations of the actual hero mesh.

[G@lvo]

Very cool stuff! I think that this approach to rigging really makes animators happy!
When I'm using Maya I like to work with something similar to this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V911_DcsaH8