Blender: Mixamo Control rig + Rigify face rig

welcome to cg dive this is the fourth video about using miximo in blender together we are working with the miximo add-on for blender which easily creates user-friendly control rigs for us so be sure to check out the previous videos in this one i'll cover the most popular question that i got and that is how do i attach a face rig to the miximo rig i'm going to show you how you can attach a rigify phase rig to the rig generated by the maximo atom so let's get going here i have good old sintel and you can easily download her from blendswap i did some slight changes to the model but i think most of you will be trying to rig your own character so i think we should focus on the principles first i've split her into multiple objects and that is something that you may want to do if you're working on your own character so the main body is one mesh and i may actually want to join the boots as well just ctrl j and then if i hide this i can see the other parts and here i have the eyes which have their origin point placed right in the center i have upper teeth lower teeth and a tongue object and here which is a very simple polygon here that i created it could be much better but that's not the point so let's keep going so i'll unhide my character and here you can see that if i rotate this i um it will stay within the eye socket and that will help us with face rigging so if you're working on your own model i would recommend that you have something like this each eye is a separate object and you can rotate the eyes without getting weird intersection with the head model okay that's it about model preparation so now i can export an fbx i want to export everything that i have in this scene so i'll just go to file export fpx and i'm going to use the default options if you want to limit what is being exported you can select your objects that you want to export and use the selected objects only checkbox but in this case i don't need it so i'll simply export my fbx okay let's go to mixamo and upload a character i'm going to drag my fbx file over here and rig my character with the miximo tools i've shown this before so let's do it really quickly next in here we have the test animation it's looking good i'm going to confirm that i want to change the character and as i explained in the previous videos don't worry that the textures are not displayed in that you may be seeing some glitches in the display of the character i'm going to apply an animation to my character and export how about this one download with the default settings okay i'm going to go back to blender file import fpx and here's the file that i downloaded i'll import it with the default settings and in this case my character was imported with almost perfect textures but that may not be the case for you so i showed how to fix this in the previous video i'm going to quickly show it again first i'm going to create a new collection to place these new imported objects that i got and then i'll simply delete my initial objects okay and now i'll select each of the objects go to the material tab and i'm going to switch this material with the original one same for the eyes in the other objects okay so that's the material setup next i'm going to select the armature go to the miximo tab zero out my rig that will delete the animation but that's okay and i'm going to create my control rig and that is the control rig process now let's see how we can add a rigidify face rig to this miximo control rig it is really not difficult you just need to keep in mind some rules and principles so now we want to add a rigifi face rig to our scene um and if you are a fan of cg dive you'll probably know how i would do it i would add a single bone and then go to edit mode delete the single bone go to the armature tab in edit mode and here i'll search for face because i'm using blender 3 i have new face rig types which i'll try to cover in the future but regardless of your blender version you will have a superface so i'm going to add is a sample and that will be my face rig and then i can match it to the face and and then start aligning it to the character and i'm going to do this but i know that a lot of you will just add a human meta rig and then delete the bones that you don't need so i'm also going to do it this way just to make sure that i show you which bones you should delete in which you should keep so let's press slash to isolate this meta rig and go to edit mode and delete all of these bones above the neck okay now we are left with the face neck and head so i'm going to hover over the neck bone and press l and that will select the neck in the head then i'll press delete and delete the bones and this is what you need to leave so next we are going to start aligning these bones to the face of our character and especially if you're using blender 3 make sure that you watch the end of this process because there is something special that you need to do in blender 3. it may be a bug actually um anyway i'll show it to you at the end so i'll go out of local mode and make sure that i'm in edit mode and then i'll align these face bones to the face uh to the face of my character i'm going to switch to bounding box so that i can move the whole face as one unit okay and that is the basic alignment uh next i'm actually going to hide stuff that i don't need so that it is easier to align the bones i'm going to hide the hair and other than that we are ready to go so let's go back to the rig and go to edit mode and i have a dedicated video about the face rig if you've watched it you know that i like to start from the side view let's turn on in front oh and i forgot to turn on x-axis mirror that will save us a lot of time so let's turn it on and now i only need to align one one side of the rig and the other will be aligned automatically like this once i'm done with the basic alignment from the side view i can switch to face snapping and now if i just select some of my joints and move them and hold ctrl that will snap them to the surface of my character at this point you may like to turn off in front it may actually make your work easier the main face joints are starting to look okay so let's go to object mode hide the head and i'll focus on the eyes teeth and tongue so for the eyes i have the origin point just when i want it so i'll select one eye press shift s cursor to select it then go to the rig edit mode select the eye bone shift s selection to cursor turn on in front to see it better and with individual origins i'm going to scale it up a little bit okay and this position should be good uh then we have the upper teeth bone just align it roughly with the upper teeth and that is the lower teeth bone now i want to hide the teeth quickly these are the tongue bones so let's align them with the tongue that we have you can hide some bones if they are getting in the way and then unhide them i'm not quite sure why but i think the eye bone didn't quite snap to where i wanted to so let's do it again select the eye bone shift this selection to cursor okay okay that's perfect now we can generate this rig and if you're using blender 2.93 or earlier then you're good to go but if you're using blender 3 there is something that you need to know i think it's a bug actually so in blender 3 we have an updated face rig and to get access to it you just use the normal super face and you press the upgrade face rig button and actually let's undo and do it again and you'll see that there were some slight changes some additional bones to the rig and now if i just generate this rig you'll see if you're familiar with the rig that's something seem to be seems to be missing so i'm going to undo and let's isolate the metal rig sorry just the meta rig and here is what i found out it seems that this new face rig needs a parent in order to generate correctly i don't know why and i think it's a bug because it doesn't make sense to behave like this so the easiest thing that you can do is go to pause mode select this face bone which doesn't really have a function it's just the parent of all of the other face bones and go to the bone tab and give it a rig type like super copy and you can actually disable control that will make it simpler now you can generate the rig and you'll see that it is properly generated now so i'll hide the meta rig and next we can focus on combining this face rig with the miximo control rig and here is probably the most important thing that you have to do you will have to join your face rig and your body rig into a single armature so a lot of people ask me about this and i saw this over and over again people trying to bind the character to two separate rigs and this almost never works unless you really really know what you're doing always have your rig as a single armature before we join the rigs let's make sure that we understand them i'll go to object mode and the miximo rig has the controls on the first layer and the deforming bones on the second layer okay the rigify phase rig has main controls on the first layer secondary controls on the second layer and even finer controls on the third layer so i'll go to pause mode select all of these controls on the third layer and i'm going to move them here on the bottom layer and then go to the second layer select everything and move them to this layer okay then rigify has the deforming bones always on this layer over here so i'm going to enable it select everything and move them to layer two so that they are on the same layer as the miximo deforming bones and the remaining layers here you can leave alone let's unhide our main layer now go to object mode have the face rig selected then shift select the miximo control rig and press ctrl j okay the next steps are quite important first we need to make sure that the new face bones move together with the head and then we need to make the deforming bones actually deform the mesh so let's isolate the rig [Music] and go to the very last layer that we have these are the bones that we inherited from rigify and these are the so-called org bones let's go to edit mode select the org face bone the parent of all of the other bones and then shift click on the layer with the deformation bones shift and select the head and press ctrl p keep offset okay let's go out of local mode and enable our controls and now if i move the head you'll see that the face controls move with it so step one was successful but now these controls that we have just stand there and they don't do anything that is because they move the deformation bones but the deformation bones do not affect the mesh so given this situation here is the best way in my opinion in which you can add these deforming bones display only the deforming bones and maybe isolate the rig select all face bones and the head bone as well you could select the neck bone as well but i'm going to deselect it okay then go out of local mode and back to object mode then select the mesh again local mode go to edit mode and make sure that x-ray is enabled and select all vertices of the face and a little bit maybe half of the neck okay everything is selected now go back to object mode in object mode select the rig shift select the mesh go to weight paint mode and again i can enable x-ray and you'll see that the bone selection that i did is still active and then i can also press this button to enable the vertex selection and that will also enable the vertex selection that i did earlier so now i can just go to weights assign automatic from bones and that will basically do automatic weighting but only for the bones that i have selected and also because i have vertices selected it will limit this process to the selected vertices and that's very important because otherwise since the other bones are not selected these face bones may affect the shoulder for example which we don't want okay so now i'll disable the vertex selection and for good measure i'm going to go to weights and normalize all because this process of adding new bones may mess up some of the weighting but with normalize all it should all be fixed so now we are almost there actually i'm going to select the rig enable my controls now if i rotate the head it moves the whole head if i try this jaw widget for example it will open the mouth eyes the eye control will deform the eyelids but not the eyes and that is because we haven't parented the eyes yet so in a nutshell things are already working so we need to take care of binding the other face meshes and everything will be set so i'm going to hide this main mesh now to focus on the other areas and i'm going to select this eye for example and it's currently controlled by the head i don't want that i want it to be controlled by the eye so i'm going to delete this vertex group add a new one call it d e f i dot l go to edit mode select all vertices and press assign and now and i will see that this eye is moving with the rig and now i have to do the same for the other eye for the teeth and for the tongue if you don't know the names of the deforming bones you can go to this layer and just select the bone blender three generates a bunch of eye bones but the ones you but the one you want is d e f i dot r for the teeth you have operative d a f t f t and the lower t f r d e f t f dot b okay so these are the name of the vertex groups that you want to create so i'll go to the i and the sign teeth and for the tongue i'll actually again assign from bones so i'll hide the teeth select the armature shift select the tongue go to weight paint mode and select these tongue bones and then go to weights assign automatic from bones now if we unhide everything and go to the armature unhide the controls everything should be working i can move the head i can control the eyes i can open the jaw i needed to get rid of some of the vertex groups for the tongue but anyway back to the rig here are more controls i should be able to close the eye the eye always needs a little bit of weight painting to work well but that is not too bad for simple automatic weights so there you have it this is a working miximo control rig combined with a working rigidify phase rig there are a few little things to keep in mind if i go to pause mode and select the jaw on the properties you'll find the mouth lock option if you enable it this will create a slightly different behavior for the mouth it won't open even when i move the jaw so that can be used to animate chewing for example there is another setting for the eyes there is a parent switch and by default the eyes move with the head if i change this parent switch to one the eye control will become independent of the movement of the head and that allows you to fix the eyes on an object while the character is actually moving the head in a proper regard five rig you will have these settings in a nice menu but because we combined this phase rig with the miximo control rig we lost this menu however the settings are still here so i'm going to bring them back to default i'm just quickly going to show you that you can still retarget miximo animations to this rig even though we attach the face to it so if i just import an fpx like this animation that i uh downloaded at the start i can actually delete all the meshes uh and then select the control rig go to miximo tab choose my source skeleton and apply animation to control rig and there we are um our animation is working and if i and if i try to control the face it is going to be working as well and that is the process of adding a redefine phase to a maximo rig one thing to note is that the rigify phase is not game friendly so if you want to export this to a game engine then you'll have to use a game ready workflow i have a whole playlist about that and also we have an add-on called game rig tools so check them out and i was also thinking of showing how to create your own simple and game friendly face rig that you can add to miximo but that would make the video very very long so i'll make that a separate tutorial that will be coming soon speaking of which if you want to get some of my unreleased tutorials check out the cg dive membership on gumroad or patreon i recommend gumroad because it allows video streaming and other good stuff but yeah you can get my videos there early and you'll be supporting the channel big thanks to all members for their support and you know the drill like subscribe and i hope you tune in next time

Channel: CGDive (Blender Rigging Tuts)

Views: 119,959

Keywords: blender3d, b3d, rigging

Id: 7WDBqXTAKDg

Length: 22min 12sec (1332 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 10 2022