Has anyone ever attempted something similar in Blender, maybe with the Mesh Deform modifier or something?ĭo you have example of people successfully using multiple armatures for the face? On the other hand, it seems unnecessarily complicated. What’s the benefit in working this way? As far as I can tell, it’s a less destructive way to work, because it means you don’t have to worry about messing up your weight painting, and might give better control over how the face is deformed. And then their deformations are transferred back to the global rig’s mesh via blendshapes. The controls from the global rig directly affect the joints from each local rig via a transform constraint.Each rig consists of a duplicate of the mesh, and deformation joints for the head and one specific facial feature. Rather than adding joints for the other parts directly in the global rig, he has separate “local rigs” for each part of the face: one for the eyes, one for the nose, one for the mouth, and one for the ears (the eyebrows and cheeks are handled purely through blendshapes). However, only the head, upper and lower halves, and jaw have deformation joints and weight painting.

It has controls for the head, jaw, upper and lower parts of the head, as well as the eyes, brows, mouth, nose, and ears.

First he has a global rig which the animator operates.

Maybe a Maya user could help me out with this: In his workflow, rather than adding all the deformation joints to one rig, he has the following set up: Even though I haven’t used Maya in 2 years, and the rigging workflow is completely different from Blender’s, I was able to follow most of the information, and I’m wondering how such a workflow could be applied to Blender. Updated April 2021: Updated Broken Links, Updated prices.ĭisclaimer: Before you download a rig, please read the terms and conditions of each rig.So I just finished watching Josh Sobel’s face rigging course, and I’m quite impressed with what it covers. However, these are my top picks, primarily cartoon-style rigs – inspired by Pixar, Disney, and Blue Sky Studios. There are several lists online of character animation rigs available already. Instead, it is a simple resource to bookmark and share when animators are ready to do character animation. This list is provided for character animators or TDs looking for quality rigs for training, studying, animation, short films, demo reels, character acting, 11-second club, etc. I am using them to study rigging and practicing character animation in Maya. Have you ever watched a student highlight demo reel and said, “where did they get that rig from” or “what character rig is that”? Since I’m exploring CG character animation, I have searched and found several rig downloads.

Good facial rigs for maya