Punk Girl
Personal Project
Facial Rig • Python Custom Script
Final Result
Breakdown
Sculpting
I sculpted out my character using Zbrush from 2d references that I found online. I mostly used a single reference, but also used a few refences to get different shapes for the eyebrows and the nose. I did my best to look out for the landmarks on the face to get better deformations in the rig.
Iris Scale
The iris scale was done using quaternions, which transform the z-translation to an arc around a circle. This was then used for the scaling of the iris so that as it scales, it slides along the surface of the eyeball. There are some limitations for this setup on more realistic eyes such as this character. From the side, you will notice that as the iris is scaled up, it loses volume from the front as it slide back along the eyeball. This setup is ideal for more stylized eyes, but I wanted to add this feature to see how it will work with my character.
Lip Zip
The zipper feature of the lips are nice to have to get tighter corners of the mouth. I used a series of curves and locators to achieve this effect. You have the ablility to control the smoothness of the zipper as well as adjust it if there is an overshoot on the lips. You can also seal the mouth completely as well as adjust the mouth seal height.
Squash and Stretch
I added in a squash and stretch feature in the rig to get subtle movements for more stylized animation. Higher level controls were added to the upper and lower controls of the face in order to achieve the effect. Because the effect was achieved without deformers, it is optimzed for performance.
Mouth Deformations
I spent the most time working on the correctives for the lip corners to get clean deformations and appealing expressions. I tried my best to push the expressions as far as I can to achieve more extreme expressions. For the correctives on the face, I spent some extra time to create scripts to automate creating deltas for both sides and adding them to the body mesh.
Wrinkle Deformations
Correctives were added to achieve clean deformations of the eyebrow and nose wrinkles. I used lots of facial expression references to get a look that works in both realistic and also stylized expressions. I had a lot of fun creating the corrective sculpts and really trying to push the expressions to the limit!
Gallery
Credits
Sculpt:
Jason Cho
Rigging Artist:
Jason Cho