[Blender 2.8/2.9] Rigify Face Rig (Rigify Series, Part #9)

the face rig type is one of the most complex rig types in rigify it consists of a large number of bones that are parented in an intricate way that is difficult to create manually so pretty much the only way that you will ever create a face rig type is through the samples i'm going to start with an empty armature go to the rigidify samples look for a face select it and click add sample and as you can see that created something that resembles a human face with a nose and eyes bros cheeks mouth chin etc so always create the face from the samples creating it manually should be possible but it is way too complicated and basically pointless another thing to note is that the face is prone to generation errors because of its complex structure one thing you should never do is delete any of the bones that you got from the sample one problem that a lot of people experience is that they try to isolate certain features of the face for example only the eyes or only the mouth and when they try to generate they get an error another thing you should avoid is separating those bones that are overlapping so for example if you want to adjust this area of the face do not just move this bone press c and click in this area and this will select all of the underlying bones that is easier to see in wireframe mode so this is only one bone selected and this is all bone selected and then you can move it around so in simple terms you should be very careful with the face and do not tamper with it the face does not have any special options in its rig type aside from layer placement so these are the main things that you need to know about creating the face structure in the section about the generated rig we are going to practice using this rig type in a small practice session we are going to practice aligning all of these bones to an actual face and then we are going to look at all of the controllers and features that we get with the face rig type an interesting fact about the face while the sample gives you something that resembles a human face this rig type can actually be adapted to other type of faces this is the prebuilt human meta rig and it has the standard phase structure here we have the cat and the prebuilt cat matarik uses the exact same face bones but they're aligned in a different way which gives it more of a cat appearance and here we have the pre-built wolf meta rig this is the same face as in the human but it is adapted and it has more of a canine appearance let's see how we can use the face rig type to rig the face of a character to concentrate better on the face i have deleted most of the body of the character and i have left only the head so the rig types that we are going to use is just a head and face one idea that you may have is that you could just create the human meta egg i'm going to isolate it for a second and just delete everything except the head and the face and that's and that's fine the only thing you need to be careful is that if you try to generate this rig in this state you'll get an error one of uh regified cryptic errors generation has thrown an exception non-type let's undo the reason that happens is that the head has the connect chain option on if you uncheck it and generate again then the rig will generate correctly but anyway let's create this rig the cg dive way and that is starting from a single bone i'm going to delete the single bone and look for a head added to the scene i'm going to turn on in front and align the head to my character the last bone of this chain represents the head so it needs to be longer and this point is the pivot point on which the head is going to rotate now let's add the face as well make sure to keep the face in the center now the chain of the head is getting in the way so i'm going to select it and press h to hide it and also i'm going to hide these bones inside of the face structure those are the teeth and a tongue i'm going to align those later and speaking of that um i'm going to go to object mode and hide the whole metaric this character consists of a head object eyes which are separate objects upper teeth lower teeth and one tongue object and let's see how we can rig all of that so that it behaves as a single character working with the face is not so difficult but you have to be really careful not to disconnect any of the bones let's go to edit mode and let's first go to the side view i want to keep these bones that are in the middle of the head i want to keep them in the middle and i found the easiest way to do that is to go to side view and align these bones to the character in side view now i want to align this bone if i click here and try to move i'm only going to be moving one of the bones so i'm going to press c click here and now i'm moving the whole bunch and i'm going to align it with the top of the nose again here press c and then move the bone make sure you have x-axis mirror on this here is the tip of the nose so align it with the tip and on the bottom of the nose you want these two bones and this last bone will be aligned with the area below the nose and let's do the same for the chin the alignment of the chin needs to be something like this aligning the center of the face is one of the most difficult tasks so we've made good progress let's keep going to align the rest of the bones it is best to switch to face snapping and you can either turn on snapping or you can just select a bone and whenever you want to snap hold ctrl and it will snap to the surface of your character let's align the jaw in side view as well the connection between these two bones is very important this will become the pivot point for the jaw i'm going to press it around here but if the results we get are not good i'm definitely going to go back to the meta rig and fix this position i'm going to grab this part here and hold ctrl to snap it to the jaw and here this part needs to be aligned to the ear of the character i'm holding ctrl as i'm moving these bones over the ear this part can be disconnected so press c select all the bones underneath and then move them and hold ctrl this part needs to go around the end of the nostrils i'm going to hide this bone as well because this bone only holds the rig type and it has no functionality this bone needs to be aligned with the cheekbone over here i definitely need to select all the nodules underneath and move them together let's align these bones to the pro use the c selection to select everything everything starts to get nicely aligned the mouth and the eyes still need to be aligned let's move to the mouth be sure not to disconnect these bones and to keep them right in the middle of the face this cross section of bones needs to be at the edge of the mouth this bone chain needs to be aligned to the area above the eye try to keep these bones more or less aligned in a straight line this is all for the alignment of the bones everything seems okay now i want to parent this bone which is the parent of the whole face and i want to parent it to the head and just for good measure i'm going to add some supporting bones let's give it a super copy rig type and symmetrize it and parent it to the actual neck if it's not already parented i'm ready to generate my rig generating the face rig takes considerably longer than generating most other rig types let's hide the meta rig and right away we can try to parent the face with automatic weights and the main controls seem to work except that the eyes and teeth are not parented correctly let's hide the head mesh and here i realized that i forgot to align the teeth in the metarig so let's unhide everything i'm actually going to delete the generated rig unhide the metarig go back to it let's now select the tongue and the teeth and press shift h to hide everything except for those bones i'm going to hide the head and then back to the meta rig i can easily now align the upper teeth to the upper teeth lower teeth to lower teeth and then in wireframe let's hide the teeth as well and now i can align the tongue bones to the tongue so that should work let's unhide everything generate the rig and let's parent the head again with with automatic weights this should give us basic vertex weights now i want to parent the the teeth directly to the teeth bones i'm going to select the lower teeth then the generated rig go to pause mode select thief.b bone and press ctrl p and choose bone and let's do the same with the upper thief in solid mode i can now rotate the jaw and which would open the the mouth and i can see that the teeth are parented correctly they rotate with the jaw as for the tongue i actually should have made it a part of the of the head mesh so let's do that i'm going to clear all transforms select the tongue then the face and press ctrl j and now i'm going to re-parent with automatic weights now the tongue is also moving and if i find the tongue control i can see that i can manipulate it and now for the most difficult parenting task for some reason the vidify face does not give you a way to parent the eyes to a widget so the solution is to parent them to one of the mechanism bones or to the original bones either way works i'm not sure which one is more correct than the other in this case let's parent them to the mechanical bones which are on layer 30. let's hide the face and now i realize another mistake i forgot to align the eye bones in the meta rig to my eyes so let's go back to the meta rig these bones here are the eye bones let's select both of them and press shift h then i'm going to go to object mode select one of the eyes press shift s cursor to select it go back to the meta rig select this bone and press shift s selection to cursor and that will snap my eye bones exactly to the pivot point of the eye which is exactly what we need let's generate the rig again and hide everything and hide just the meta rig i do not need to re-parent anything all the parenting should be set up correctly let's click on layer 30 to unhide the mechanical bones hide the head mesh select one of the eyes then the generated rig go to pause mode and choose the mchi dot l and press ctrl p and parent it directly to the bone and do the same on the other side great now let's unhide our main layers and shift click shift click on layer 30 to hide it now if i move the eye widget the eyes are going to move and we have some nice deformation in the eyelids as well with that we've successfully rigged our face this here is the neck control this is the head control this is the jaw control this is the eye control and it can control the direction of both eyes but also there are these individual widgets that can that can move each eye individually so for example you can achieve a cross-eyed effect and one final thing that can be improved in the meta rig now is to set up the rig layers and bone groups correctly so let's go back to the meta rig and see what we can do select the parent of the face and under bone tab look for the rig if i type and here we have primary extras and secondary extras so the main controls are this jaw and eye controls and then there are some additional tweak controls and finally there are some even finer additional controls and by default both of those are set to the same layers which is not ideal let's set the secondary layers to the third layer and let's expand rigify bone groups and click add standard and under rigify layer names i'll click add regify layers the first layer will be the face face main the second one is face tweak and the third one let's call face tweak two let's organize the head as well i'm going to move its bones to the fourth layer and let's call the fourth head and the fifth is add tweak i'm going to put the face tweaks to the second row and everything related to the head will be on the third let's set up the bone groups as well now if i generate i expect to have nicely organized layers let's hide the tweak layers for now and look at the main controls that we have we have a jaw when you rotate it it opens the mouth there is an eye control that i've only already mentioned your character is always going to be looking at this widget and the viewport display let's turn on in front that will allow us to see some of the other widgets this one is the tongue widget it will allow you to easily control the tongue you can move it or rotate it there is a teeth control which in most cases you won't touch much but it's nice to have lower teeth and upper teeth there is an eye control which is also not extremely helpful especially for realistic motion and animation it kind of moves the whole eye area there is a nose control and ear control again i'm not sure why these are under main controls i don't think you animate the nose of your character very often but that is what we have let's turn on the face tweak and see what we have we have a couple of lip tweaks this bone that kind of manipulates the cheek area we have further control over the nose these eyes lit controls are extremely important they allow you to open and close the eyelids so personally i would put those on the main layer and this thing here should be on a tweak layer and then there are some brow controls and if i unhide the second tweak layer you get even finer control over specific parts of the face there is more control over the eyelids further control over the nose and some further control over the ears and more control over the tongue i'm going to hide the tweak layers again when you select any of the widgets of the face you get the only two modifications that you can do to the face rig one is called mouth lock and it's off by default if i switch it to one then moving the jaw won't open the the mouth and this can probably be used for some sort of chewing motion now the i follow option this is how you use the rigifi rig and these are all of its options and automations currently our face is weighted with automatic weights and that means that some parts of the face won't deform perfectly for example the eyelid the eyelids can definitely be fixed with some weight painting an area that i find problematic with the rigifi face rig is the mouth when the jaw is opened if i open the jaw the shape of the mouth tends to be this angular shape whereas having it more curved would be more realistic this seems to be a problem with how the rigifi bones are connected up one solution is to use corrective shape keys and of course you can improve the shape of the mouth to some extent using the tweak bones you

Channel: CGDive

Views: 79,515

Keywords: rigify, rigging, 3d, b3d, blender, blend3d, 2.9, 2.90, 2.90.1, 2.82, 2.83, 2.83.1, 2.83.2, 2.83.3, 2.83.4, 2.83.5, 2.83.6, 2.83.7, 2.83.8, 2.83.9, 2.91, 2.92

Id: n8aCBKjPJRE

Length: 23min 2sec (1382 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 04 2020