Blender 4.0 Facial Animation with NO RIGGING!

this monstrosity is a face rig and if you want to animate your character's face you have to fit this animatronic looking skeleton inside the head of your model and then to animate your character you have to move and rotate each of these bones What If instead you were able to make different facial expressions by either sculpting or modeling your character's face and then using something like this to pick and choose the expression this isn't anything new by the way this is how 2D animation has been done for years the artist would pick the expression they want for the given line of dialogue or action and then key frame that expression and move on to the next one it doesn't need to be complicated so why do we over complicate it in 3D I personally never want to make another face rig again so I'll show you how to do this in blender this method will work best on stylized characters that have more cartoony proportions it will also work for realistic characters but the more choppy animation style won't look as good on a realistic Model A lot of this is manual repetitive work but I just released my shape keys selector add-on that makes this whole process so much easier with one click we can import all of our images and the Expressions work instantly and go ahead and check it out the Link's in the description it won't be needed for the video but it definitely makes things easier anyway first off pick a character you want to animate or if you want go and download my practice model for free the Link's in the description once you have your character we need to pick some facial expressions that we want to model to keep it simple for this I'll be modeling three Expressions happy scared and angry combined with the neutral expression that gives us four we're going to break up the Expressions into three different categories so we want the eyebrows eyes and mouth to be separate controls that way we can combine them together to get different Expressions we're going to create the expressions using shape keys and if you don't know what they are shape keys are a way of storing different versions of our model and then using the shape key sliders we can turn up or down the effect of these different versions allowing us to play around with Expressions the shape Keys just store the new positions of all of the vertices and then we blend from the base shape to the new shape let's start off with the eyebrows because they're the easiest with your model selected go to the data Tab and create a new shape Key by pressing the plus icon twice the first time you click it it will create the basis shape key which should be the most neutral state of your character and then we can add another one and name it eyebrows angry increase the value of this to one and this will allow us to see what we're doing so this is the eyebrows angry expression you can use sculpt mode or model it in edit mode but all you need to do is give your character angry eyebrows by pulling down the inner part of the eyebrow if you're in edit mode enable the x-axis mirror and proportional editing to make your life easier I prefer using edit mode because using proportional editing and turning on the connected setting means that I can move the skin without worrying about messing up any other parts of the mesh like the eyes or teeth the most important thing here is that we're only affecting the eyebrows the eyes and mouth will be handled separately so don't make any changes to them feel free to get as creative as you want with the eyebrows but this is what I ended up with that's one now let's do eyebrow sad create another shape key turn the Angry Eyebrows down to zero and for this one you'll be ringing the inner corners of the eyebrows up spend as much time on these as you want making sure to get references instead of trying to do it from memory once the side eyebrows are done add the raised shape key and make your happy eyebrows I'm not going to waste too much time here just model the eyebrows and then we're done with this step once you're finished with that your shap keys should look something like this I try to create a blank shape key to act as a label because sometimes you can get lost when there's hundreds of shape keys but you can also move them up or down to organize them the eyebrows are now done we just need to do the exact same process for the eyes and mouth I'll let you do this at your own pace but just pay attention to the shapes and make sure you're not overlapping other areas with more stylized characters feel free to exaggerate as much as you want the beauty of the shape Keys is that we can come back and change these at any time if we're not happy with them for the eyes here I really pushed the scared eyes making them huge and shrinking down the pupil to give that cartoony look also I'm changing the eyelash es by shaping them to remove some of the points with traditional 2D animation the character is very rarely drawn exactly the same way sometimes an artist might miss an eyelash or make the eye a slightly different shape so we should try to replicate that in 3D also for the mouth try and break the Symmetry a bit give your character a crooked smile and see how it looks you'll also see in my practice model that I have black faces all around the lips we can use these to our advantage to give the lips an outline to really strengthen the shape of them again these are all shape keys so nothing we're doing here is permanent if you're not happy with it keep on playing with it until it looks right or start again if you need to once you're finished with the eyes and mouth your shape Keys should look something like this go ahead and play around with it a bit turn up and down the different shapes and create some unique Expressions even though we only made three of each expression that gives us a total of over 20 unique combinations now comes the fun part where we can start hooking up all of the shape keys to our images you can get fancy by rendering out close-ups of the different parts of your model or just take screenshots or you can use use the sample ones that I've made again Link in the description this is the part of the video where we're going to get a bit more technical because we need to be very specific with everything we do from now on the way this method works is that we calculate the distance to the nearest image from our selector object when the distance is zero it means we are directly on top of the image and in that case we want the value of the shape key to be one if we then move away from the image the distance will increase and so the value of the shape key should decrease we can do this using a distance driver on our shape keys it sounds more complicated than it is but basically when we're above the image the shake key should be on and when we're off the image the shake key should be off you can hide everything in your scene or move it to a new collection to keep everything neat and tidy if your cursor isn't at the world origin press shift s and reset it now using the import images as planes add-on select all the images for the mouth category you can change the shading to shadeless so it doesn't cast a shadow or get affected by lights in your scene now we can add our first selector to the scene create a new object to be used as your selector this can be anything you want a cube a sphere a monkey or if you want you can append the one that I've made you'll find it than the files you downloaded with your selector added we want to add a few constraints so that we can only move it on the x and z AIS with the object selected go to the object constraints Tab and add the limit location constraint for limit location enable the checkbox for both minimum and maximum Y and make sure that it's set to zero also change the owner to local space now the only thing we can do with our object is move it on a 2d plane we can't move it on the y- AIS this just makes sure that the selector always stays in front of the images while we're here with the object selected you can press f2 and rename it to mouth selector we also want it to slap to the grid and to do this we can do a little bit of playing around with drivers go to the object data tab right click the X location and add a driver a new window will pop up but just click off it for now expand the bottom window and change it to the driver driver window you'll see your ex location driver on the left and a diagonal line this right here is our driver to navigate this window use the middle Mouse button to move and control and middle Mouse wheel to zoom on either axis pressing numpad period or choosing view frame selected will Zoom directly to the center of the graph I'll explain more about the drivers later but for now let's just get the object to snap to the grid select the driver on the left hand side then back on the right hand side of the window you'll see a few tabs have appeared open the Drive Tab and expand it if you need to at the very top we can see it says scripted expression scripted expression means that we can actually do some formulas to calculate the value for the driver for this one we'll keep it fairly simple so just change this to round Open brackets VAR close brackets just a side note blender is made with the Python programming language so round is just a math function that rounds any number to the nearest whole number the variable that this function is referring to is listed below these variables can be anything but in this case it's a transform what we want to do is use the X location of the selector itself and then round that number so that it's always a whole number meaning it will snap to the center of each image underneath the object field choose your selector object then change the space to transform space now if you move your selector you'll see it's snapping along the x-axis but it's still moving freely along the Zed AIS so repeat the same process for the Zed location add the driver and this time we'll be using the Z location for the driver transform now our selector is snapping to the grid and we can't move it along the y-axis let's now add a parent object so we can move around all of our images and selectors at the one time I'll make mine a text object and this will act as a header for our category so just type in mouth and parent the images and the selector to the text with contrl P now we can move the text off to the side and bring back our character now it's time to add some drivers our text is quite big so we can scale it down and move it near the head and because we set the snapping drivers to transform space our selector will still snap correctly even though it's smaller now select your character and go back to the shape Keys we only have the mouse selector for now so we can add the mouth drivers first all you have to do is right click on the number beside the shape key and add a driver a window will pop up just ignore it these are all settings that we'll be changing later in the driver window if you did that correctly the number should turn purple in blender any feeli that is purple means that is being controlled by a driver do this for all three mouth expressions in the driver window you should now see a list of your three drivers if you zoom in close enough you'll see that there are two points one at 0 0 and the other at 1 one these are the default values for the driver and we'll be changing these in a second to make it easier to work with though we can hide some of the drivers by clicking the I icons on the left hide two of them we only just want to work with one for now to explain a bit more about what the driver is actually doing I've set up this EX example as I just mentioned those two points in the bottom window are actually key frames and these key frames have values that you can see in the fcurve tab on the right hand side to visualize this a bit better I've just added a driver to the X location of this Cube so that I can move it with this slider so at a value of zero the cube moves to an X location of zero and at one it moves to an X location of one what happens if I change this let's say instead of moving 1 M at one we move it 10 m now when we increase our slide the cube moves 10 m even though the slider is only moving from 0 to 1 we can also move rotate and scale these key frames like any other object so what happens if we rotate the points in the driver window or scale them now our Cube starts off at zero as we increase the value it goes up to about 15 M and then back to 10 but our slider is only moving between 0 and 1 so the whole idea behind drivers is that we give it an input in this case our slider and then the driver uses the input to calculate the output the location of the cube let's go back to our character in the driver window select the driver and in the driver's tab on the right hand side this time instead of rounding the variable we can just leave it as VAR we can change the type of this variable to distance and now we have to choose two objects the first being our selector and the second being our image make sure you choose the matching image for your chosen shape key and change both inputs to transform space select the first point and in the F curve tab on the right make sure that the key frame is at zero and the value is at one select the next Point make sure it's set to a value of 1 and zero your driver graph should now look something like this to prove that it works move the selector back and forth and you should see your expression change now we just need to do the same process for the other mouth Expressions repeat the same process for the other two mouth Expressions making sure to choose the correct image that your distance driver is set to transform space if you have any problems go back to the driver's Tab and make sure that the the expression is just VAR and that your variable also has the same name sometimes it might have a number added to it and that'll cause problems with that done now you can move your mouth selector back and forth and it will change the expression if you want to see what it looks like without the snapping you can go back to the selector drivers and get rid of the rounding now when you move the object it Blends smoothly between the shape Keys the beauty of doing this with a distance driver is that we can actually move around our images to get different blends the driver is just calculating the distance between the images so you can reorder this in any way you like some of the transitions don't look great but we can move around the images until we find some nice Blends I do really like some of the in between Expressions so instead of just rounding the position to the nearest whole number we can use this formula to round it to the nearest half now we can snap to these in between transitions without having to try and position it manually to get the perfect value if you want try out some smaller increments like rounding it to thirds or quarters that'll give you some more more in between Expressions to choose from I know this whole process takes a little bit of setup but I would much rather this than having to worry about we painting a face and moving bones to create Expressions so hopefully now you know the process add another selector for the eyes and add your constraints to the selector add the drivers to the shape Keys edit the drivers so that they use the distance between the images and the eye selector then make sure to set the key frame values for the drivers so at a distance of zero the shape key is set to one and at a distance of one the shape key is set to zero with all of the driver setup you should have something that looks like this at this point you probably want to start automating your face change your driver window back to the timeline and just click the record button above the timeline this will key frame values anytime that we move our objects so go to frame one select your expression and it'll key frame the objects for you now move forward a few frames and choose another expression maybe a blank or a smile have fun with it now if we play our animation you'll see the selectors move around and your character should be blending between Expressions the selector will move directly from one position to the next so at some points it might have to jump over other Expressions which will activate them so you might just need to change some key frames around to avoid any unwanted expressions in cartoony animation the face expressions don't always smoothly blend they jump from one expression to the next and that's what this method is perfect for if you wanted to use this for realistic animation it might not work as well as you wanted because of the blending my shake key selector add-on can do smooth blending but it's not something I can explain in a tutorial you need to know python scripting and even then it's way more complicated than just adding drivers so if you want to use this method for realistic characters maybe go ahead and check out the add-on it has tons of other quality of life features too like allowing you to change the snapping with a button press you can separate your Expressions into left and right to give you more freedom and you can also just bulk add your expressions and it will set up all the images and drivers for you but if you followed along you know how to add the drivers you know how to add the shape Keys you know how to change the snapping add-on just makes it a little bit easier anyway I hope this method helps with animating your character's faces I know how much of a pain it is to use the face rig so hopefully this method makes Face animation more accessible to everyone thanks for watching

Channel: Vertex Arcade

Views: 241,045

Keywords: blender, blender 4.0, facial animation, blender facial animation, blender shape keys, easy rigging, tutorial, blender character animation, blender drivers, blender face modelling

Id: 1Is3oUvHwdM

Length: 15min 18sec (918 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 13 2023