[BLENDER TUTORIAL] Basic Face Rig & Eye track

Oh guys today I'm gonna be showing you how to do a head rig I found that there aren't a lot of accessible tutorials online about how to make a really simple Universal head rig that can work for both low poly models and high poly models so I kind of designed mine I'm going to show you how I do it it seems to work really well especially for like posing for your portfolio or just doing really simple face animations so I can show you how I do this from complete scratch I'm actually gonna hide the body so I have only this head mesh here and I'm gonna show you before hands that I've separated the eyes on their own and I've got the head rig here head mesh I mean here's the poly structure of it it's fairly complex so you can see that this will work on most high poly models that have been reached apologized so I'm gonna go ahead and show you how to do this from complete scratch so even if you're a beginner you can follow this the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to turn on screencast so you can see what I'm doing I'm gonna left click the cursor so that it's in the middle of the neck here and make sure I'm an object mode of the head selected and a shift a armature and single bone so you're not gonna be able to see it initially so I'm just going to x-ray so you can see the octahedral bone through it and hide this mesh over here we don't need to see that right now and I'm gonna make sure I'm selecting the armature bone and I'm in edit mode the different modes dictate different actions of the armature pose mode is for moving and posing the character in edit mode is for all changes made to the mesh that will be the armature that will be permanent so I'm gonna be in edit mode of the armature I'm gonna shrink this down until it's about the size of the head you can just do that [Music] okay so you're gonna want that to go from relatively about the end of the jaw here under the ear to top of the head around there so first you have that bone so the very first thing I want to do is I want to take this mesh and I want to take this bone they some armature bone and put it into pose mode so that this blue line is around it select the mesh so it's in yellow shift select that bone control P so that you can parent that mesh to the bone what that means is I have taken the mesh and I've said I want this bone to control it 100% so I'm going to make this bone the parent & parent bones just have complete control over things you can see that the eyes have not been parented so there's kind of floating in space what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna press Alt R and alt G to reset that posing rotation I'm gonna select those eyes I'm actually going to looks like I have a mirror modifier on I'm gonna apply that I'm actually going to separate those eyes so I have this eye on the left which I'm gonna call il and this eye on the right what I'm gonna call a are just for the moment so I have these two different eyes and I have the mesh so I'm just like both of those eyes and I'm gonna Reece elect that bone in pose mode so again that's the eyes and object mode and then shift selecting this armature that's already been put into pose mode control P and then bone in this way we've got everything controlled by this one bone this is important because the head bone is going to be the base and kind of the anchor for everything on the face like the eyes will need to be parented to the head so the two like the eyebrows move with the head when that we change that so what I'm gonna do is from here I'm gonna go back into edit mode of the armature for selecting it I'm gonna go into edit mode because you want permanent changes to be made in the edit mode of the armature I'm going to shift D so I can duplicate one of these armature bones and I'm gonna move it just about here I'm gonna start with the eyebrows just so I can show you so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna move this into place I'll be doing three for the eyebrows one for here so she can frown here so it's like a lift in here real simple I don't want too many bones too many bones kind of confuse me I just want to keep this as basic as possible and so these bones will be used to control that skin once we've attached it you think of as little handles okay so the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to put another three of these above the eyelid like that there we go and then I'm just going to put one here I don't really think you need more than that if you want more than that you'll have a more complex rig and there are better tutorials about making really complex rigs but this is just basic so I'm gonna take this bone again and I'm going to shift D down to the corner of the mouth so I have one there that's controlling it I'm gonna put one here right above the lip right there I'm gonna shift D and drag that down just I'll have one there I'm actually going to select all these bones and go into the bone panel tab and just change them to stick so I can see what I'm doing a little better so we've got most of our bones set already the last thing I do is I'm going to take this main head bone shift D and rotate it so that it's roughly in line with the jaw here okay can the next thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to select all these bones I'm gonna ctrl P and I'm going to then select the head bone so the bones that are going to be controlled by the head bone the head bone is the most important so we've selected last ctrl P keep offset you'll see these lines kinds of pop up and I'll show you what we did there you can see that ever all of the sub bones are following the head bone now if we hadn't parented them they would have just stayed in space just like the eyes did so now everything's parented together everything's smooth so right now we don't have any influence we haven't added any weight what we're gonna do now is you should name them so I'm gonna go into the end panel and just name these are such so this first one I'm going to name I bro 1 dot L I'm gonna name this one eyebrow 2 dot L then I'm a name that eyebrow 3 dot L gonna name this one eyelid 1 dot L I'm gonna name this one eyelid 2 dot o and this one's going to be eyelid 3 dot out this will be lower lid I named this one upper lip dot L this will be mouth corner dot oh and this one will be lower lip dial so I'm just gonna quickly flip that over to the other side so what I'm going to do is I'm going to click in the center of the model and press period to line up my cursor so that when we flip it over it'll be directly symmetrical in edit mode I'm going to select those bones I just made only on this right half of this left half of the face I'm gonna shift D to duplicate them and then I'm gonna press W and symmetrize and that's perfectly in place because we did this we lined it up in the center and if you notice it has switched to the names for us so these are all dot R which is really nice so now we've got the basics of this space where we set up so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to pray that assign automatic weights works here so we'll see so what we're gonna do is we go in to the armature mode we're gonna go into pose mode I'm gonna select everything we're gonna select this mesh shift select the armature so we've got orange and blue control P with automatic weights and then we wait and let's see what happened so you're gonna want to press the comma to get your cursor back so we see we've got to the head bones still controlling everything you've got the jaw bone trying to work here the reason it's not working is because some of the weight some of the control for the mouth is being given to these bones here so you can see that that works and that works we can see that's working there so what we're gonna do is we're going to select these lips actually just goes like these bottom ones and I'm going to shift select what should be the boss of them ctrl P and keep offset and hopefully this will make sense now the lips still have their control of the mouth but now we're saying that when I bring the jaw down I want these to follow so you can use this technique whenever you need something to follow just checking all those that's a little weak we have to modify that okay so for the most part we've got something that seems like it's gonna work so the first thing I want to do is I want to fix up some of the waiting on this it's not perfect it's pretty good but it's not perfect so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna select the mesh and go into weight paint mode we saw here that these were not controlling it very well so I'm just going to add some weight here I open this up just by pressing T this is the weight painting menu I'm gonna make the radius a little bit larger that's just controlling the brush size and I'm gonna drop the weight and a strength down that just means that I'm gonna have less controlled with my painting so if I turn the weight all the way up you'd see that the red means it's getting a lot of control it's gonna Bend kind of unnaturally so if I just use a small amount of weight a small amount of influence it's gonna turn this light blue color and it's only gonna have a little bit of an influence so I like to start off doing it kind of slow just to make sure that we're getting it and another reason this bone is not really controlling it as well as this bone over here is that the eyebrows are exerting a lot of influence on the eyelid bone the way weight painting works is that bones have influence over certain areas of the face and they kind of compete with each other so if this eyebrow bone is controlling the eyelid the eyelid bone itself is going to have less control over the actual thing at the actual eyelid itself so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna erase this influence I put inside I don't need so I'm actually going to erase some of the influence of the eyelid of the eyebrow on the eyelid see here now the eyebrow isn't going to control that I don't really like when the eyebrow controls that very much it kind of messes some stuff up so now we'll see that this has more control over itself and it's the same with this like this is supposed to be the corner of the eye we don't need this influence here I'm going to bring up the strength a little just so I can erase this faster you don't want any of this being controlled by that eyelid I'm gonna erase this influence as well don't need that I'm also gonna erase its influence over here I don't think that's super necessary I like to erase a relatively low weight just so I don't accidentally erase thing you want to make it look as smooth as possible and then you wait paint a really small amount it's easier to make that transition a little smoother it's like right now that's a bit awkward just gonna erase that getting that down actually wait painted a little weirdly so I'm just gonna manually paint that on you have to do this sometimes if it doesn't auto it paint it very well so I'm just going to make sure nothing is being influenced by this bone and make sure I have it selected and I've erased all of the influence I can paint it in myself and I'm just going to gently kind of add in where I'd like that bone to control you for this one over here it's actually controlling the ear you can see a little bit of that influence on the ear here I'm just going to erase that okay that looks good she's gonna finally erase all the influence from here that's good it's going a little high you okay now I'm just gonna do that same thing with the other side I just want to make sure everything is doing the right thing just gonna clean this up and go quickly here you I just wanna mention if you mess it up and you don't like what you've done you can just press W and assign automatic from bones and it'll just kind of redo what it had initially so you can just start again okay now that you've done that I'm just going to erase some of this influence on the mouth and the nose it's a little bit all over the place a lot of fixing these meshes is literally just a lot of making a face rag is literally just all these small adjustments it's kind of annoying so I'm gonna add just a tiny bit to the nose here so it kind of has this like natural Bend to it that kind of happens when you sneer and I'm also just gonna add a little bit over here so that lifts up a little because when you sneer that part tends to go up but just subtly I think I'm gonna do that there we go and do the same thing to the other side this seems pretty good that seems good it's controlling more of the neck than I want it to so I'm just going to erase once on the neck there we go I think that's pretty satisfactory so if I go back into ah Dimmick mode I go into its material mode and I check how my mesh is doing that makes sense she smiles pretty realistically that works there's a couple more things that I would probably want to change and just adjust but I'm not gonna bore you with just all my weight painting so this is the gist of it the more you adjust and the more you erase the better it gets so that's the essence of the basic face rig okay the last thing I want to show you how to do is how to track the eyes right now we've got the head rigged but the eyes aren't really doing anything so what we're gonna want to do then we're gonna want to add an eye tracking bone something that the eyes can look at and that you can drag around that will control them so I'm gonna go into edit mode and I'm going to rotate a button like this and I'm gonna make it so that it's flat like that and it's gonna go right in between those two pupils drag it out a little bit so this left eye is going to track this dot here and this right eye is gonna track this dot here so when you move this around the eyes will follow it as if it's looking at it so what we're gonna do is we're going to go into our eyes you'll want to make sure that the origin is centered at the back of the eyelid right in the center because when you rotate the eye a needs to be able to rotate on an axis that makes sense an easy way to do that for me I found out let me get that back in this place is to just if you can't find a way to get the origin right there an easy way to do that is to add a plane and shrink it and then put that plane wherever you want the origin to be this is just a quick tip it may not be relevant but I just show you guys real quick anyway put it where you want to be and you can see that the cursor is there now and so you do shift s cursor to selected so that you've got your cursor right there and you can delete the plane and you'll see that you've got your cursor right where you want it to be and then you can select the mesh that you want the origin points and you control it of and you can shift to ctrl alt C and then origin to 3d cursor and then that way you've got the origin exactly where you want it and you can have the I rotate freely okay so now that we've got the origin in the place we want so that it can actually rotate correctly we're gonna want to track those eyes to this bone here so select I dot L and you're going to want to go into this panel that has a little chain on it and add a track to object constraint so we want these eyes to track to this bone here so we're gonna select the armature and then we're gonna select the eye track which I have not named yet let me name that I track there we go we're gonna select eye track you're gonna notice that it flips around and the reasoning for that is that we need to make sure the accesses are correct so what I'm gonna do so I'm gonna select the eye that we haven't done anything yet and I'm going to turn on axis you can see that the Y here is pointing up so when we go to our object constraint it's gonna say up should be Y and that should work and if you get this a little red pinkish icon that means it's not working so we need to change that so that it's the correct axis so we know here Y is up X is out and Z is front and we want that access to be the same Y is up and Z is out so that should look correct now we check to see if that's working and it's working so after that you're gonna want to be the second eye so you're gonna want to add a track to constraint to the armature and then the eye track it's gonna go crazy again and then you'll want to track it to the same thing you're gonna want to do up access is why since that's the case we're gonna want it to be the same so I'm gonna do why it's Z so these two are exactly the same that constraints are identical and to fix this we're going to change this detail that way this eye is looking at the tail into this and the sides looking at that end of that so I hope that makes sense so we're just going to have our object constraint it's gonna track it to the eye and we're gonna configure these settings here so that the accesses are correct and you wanna make sure that this isn't pink or it's not gonna work and then you'll see amazingly that it works the last thing I want to do is I'm just gonna parent the eye track to the head that way the eyes will follow okay one last time let's see perfect and then she can be a little sassy you'd want to have a mouth in there that would really sell the realism of this and that's a simple face rig hope you enjoyed this this fit rig should work for pretty much any model you can do this the same exact tactic on low poly models and high poly models hope you enjoyed it and I'll see you later

Channel: Cherylynn Lima

Views: 127,802

Keywords: tutorial, face, head, rig, eye, track, blender, maya, zbrush, animation, low poly, low, poly, high, sculpt, 3d, model, weight, painting, blink, game, development, indie, eyes, moving, beginner, easy, toon

Id: 4iBkwVQHRzA

Length: 22min 48sec (1368 seconds)

Published: Mon Nov 19 2018