Advanced character rig (8/???)
Added 2019-03-11 04:56:39 +0000 UTCThis was more of an experiment than anything else, since I'm not entirely sure if it was successful in the end.
A while ago I'd come up with the theory of driving facial bones directly via a kind of group/solo control scheme. The general idea was to scatter a bunch of controllers across the face, but have them setup in such a way that each controller could either move itself (and only itself) or intelligently manipulate those around it to simulate the general appearance of how facial muscles tend to work.
Unfortunately I don't think this really worked out for a variety of different reasons. The object hierarchy required to drive such a setup landed up being quite excessive (to say the least, there's more objects in that face rig than there are in the rest of the IK/FK body rig combined). Linking up all the various controllers together took an embarrassing amount of time, and in the end I don't even think the system is capable of achieving the vibrant expressions I want simply because the complexity of the controller <-> controller interactions tends to increase exponentially as you start implementing some of the more complicated facial movements.
Nevertheless, it was an interesting experiment- and technically the system itself does work, I just don't think it worked the way I originally intended. I'll probably land up switching to a standard 2D face control UI with FACS action units and blend shapes instead, since that seems to be the usual way of handling faces these days and should provide the flexibility I need to make sure the faces are capable of displaying a wide array emotions.
