Easy Mouth Rig || Blender 2.93

so i've been experimenting with mouth rigs and lately i've been getting pretty good results with this really simple setup it's the sort of rig that makes lip syncing a lot easier here's a quick summary of what we'll cover we'll start with modeling a head and some teeth taking advantage of the subdivision surface modifier to make things look more complex than they are then we'll set up the armature which only uses a few deforming bones after that we'll parent the head and the teeth to the armature and start weight painting trust me when i say this won't be too difficult with everything deforming properly we can set up some bone constraints to make our controls easier to use then we'll create two shape keys so our character can have different mouth shapes and last we'll create two more bones and set up drivers to control our shape keys and our constraints which will let us control everything with only a few bones it sounds complicated but it's not too bad so stick with me i'll make this file free to download on gumroad if you want to use it for reference while you follow along the link is in the description i also have some other stuff there that you can check out if you like what you see consider donating when you download something it's the best way to support the channel right now alright let's get started alright so here we are in blender i'm using version 2.93 and we have nothing in the scene right now i deleted everything and we're just going to start off with modeling the head so i'm going to add in a cube with shift a and i'm going to add a subdivision surface modifier with control 1. so you can see now our modifier is over here this video is mostly about the mouth rig so i'm not going to make a complex head or anything like that and i'm not going to do too much explaining when i model if you want something a little more in-depth you can check out the character modeling video that i did i'll put a link in the description and there should be a pop-up right over here all right so we can go into edit mode from here i'm just going to add a loop cut like that and i'm just going to kind of use that subdivision surface modifier to round everything out and we don't really need too much geometry going on so i'll look from the side go into x-ray mode and i'm just going to drag this down like that we'll bring that up just trying to get a pretty basic head shape so when i'm modeling the head i'm basically just looking at these two planes right here because this is where i'm planning on putting my mouth so i want to make sure that the middle of that is going to be a good spot for the mouth that's why i dragged this front part down quite a bit more than the back and i think that's looking pretty good so i'm going to go back into object mode with tab and we're actually going to apply this modifier right here so that when we go into edit mode you can edit each of these vertices individually like that and to make it a little more smooth we can just add another subdivision surface modifier like that and so i'm just going to go back into edit mode and and just so we only have to edit half of our mesh i'm just going to delete the other half like that and we'll add in a mirror modifier like that you can see there's a seam running down the middle so we just have to move this modifier to the top and it should clear up now all right so now that we're in here we can get started on the mouth so just make sure you're in face select mode right there i'm just going to select this face and hit i to inset and hit b for boundary and that's going to make it snap to the middle like that and i'm just going to make this pretty small not too small just pretty close to being closed like that and i'm just gonna grab these vertices and hit g twice to move them up like this and just make them a little straighter all right then we can turn off the mirror modifier briefly just so we can see inside our head a little better so i'll just grab this face right here and we'll extrude that on the y axis right there and we're just making the inside of the mouth and i'm going to make a little pocket in here too just so it goes in a little further i'll extrude a little more like that and i'm just going to scale that on the y by zero so it's flat at the end right there and i'll add another loop cut in right there and we can just scale this up like that just so there's kind of like a pocket in there it goes in and you can see we have a weird cleft in the middle and that's just because we have these faces so you can just delete the faces that are on the inside like that and it'll look a little better and i'll just move this back a little further like that that should be fine so now we have our mouth right here and i'll also add some eyes just so it doesn't look as creepy and if it's in the center when you inset um you can just hit b again and i'll just slide this edge with g twice and we'll have some like tall kind of cartoony looking eyes we can extrude this on the y and i'm going to grab this loop right here and hit n to open up the side panel and i'll just turn the mean crease all the way up and you can see it's kind of sharpening the edge like that all right so this is basically all the modeling we're going to do for the head um and now we can make the teeth i'll just rename this head like that and for the teeth i'll add in a cube like this we can go straight into edit mode i'm going to use x-ray mode right here and i'm just going to start scaling this so these are going to be our lower teeth and i can just add a loop cut right here i'll just drag this over just so it kind of contours with our head a little more and the it might seem a little tall for the teeth but i'm i'm leaving a little space down here so they're like embedded in the mesh right there and i'll drag this in so the teeth are a little sharper now we can look from the top and i'm going to add a loop cut right here just so they're not completely straight i'm going to pull them back like this then i'm going to select the middle and bevel that and if you want this to have more loop cuts you can just use your scroll wheel like that for your with your mouse so i think that should be okay that looks all right and you can see because we were in edit mode our origin point is still up here so we can reset it with right clicking set origin and i'm going to choose uh center of mass right there i'll rename this so we can just duplicate these teeth right here and rotate it around 180 degrees like that can just pull it up right here and it's okay if they overlap because we're gonna offset them slightly like this so they're not you know right on each other one is in front of the other all right and we can just rename this teeth top so next we can get started with our armature so we can just shift a and add in an armature right here and right now we can't really see it that well because it's inside the head so i'm just going to go over here to object data properties and under viewport display i'm going to turn on in front like that so now you can see through and i'm also going to turn on names and axes like that and we're going to go into edit mode and just move this down right here this is just going to be to control the entire head and we can rename this head if you want the head to be parented to something because we don't have a body you can just duplicate that and move it down and instead of scaling i like to change the length over here like that and we can just make this the root bone i'll just rename that root and you can just make sure that your head is parented to it with ctrl p and keep offset so this is basically going to be the highest bone uh in our skeleton right so next we can make the bone for the jaw which is going to be right around here so i'm just going to duplicate this and i want this to rotate from the head so to do that you can hit period and change the pivot point to active element like that and now it'll rotate from the head right there i'm basically just going to put this where i think the jaw would pivot which is maybe like around around here like that and when you get it where you want it you can change the length like this or rotate it a little more i'm going to make it pointing towards the chin and extending just a little further that way if we turn off in front we can still control it from the outside so this is going to be our jaw like that and we can parent this to the head control p and keep offset and so we're just going to do the same thing for our lower lips so i'm just going to duplicate the jaw right here and rotate it like that and that's going to be for our bottom lip duplicate it again and that's going to be for our top lip so you can rename those lip bottom and lip top and all of these are parented to the head so if we go into pose mode right here and you move the head all of those should follow and if you move the root everything should follow that alright and all of these are going to be deforming bones except for the root so if you don't want a bone to be a deforming bone you can just select it either in edit mode or pose mode and go over here to bone properties and there's just a box right here you can just turn that off all right and now that we're done with these um just so they don't cover up as much i'm going to change them from octahedral to stick that way we can still see through our mesh but they're not taking up so much space and now we can get started with weight painting so first we're going to select our head and then shift select our armature control p and instead of with automatic weights i'm going to choose with empty groups so if we click on our head we have some vertex groups right here and it's all of our deforming bones but all of these are going to be empty right now so we still have to set these manually but first i'm going to do the same thing for both of our teeth so i'm going to select the top and then the armature control p with empty groups and the same thing for our bottom teeth right here empty groups all right and so the way i like to do this is by selecting your armature and going into pose mode with control tab like that so we're in pose mode now so then under edit mode you can turn off lock object modes like this and this will allow you to select your head over here in the outliner and you can go to weight painting and when you have lock object modes turned off it'll allow you to view either the weights of your bones by control clicking them like this but you have to do everything in that order so that if this isn't working just back up and rewatch it and make sure you're doing everything in that order otherwise you have to select all of your weights over here to see what they look like and you know obviously i'm like selecting things now and nothing is changing and again that's just because we don't have any weights set up so another thing that's going to make weight painting a lot easier is turning wireframe on over here and this is showing our real geometry before the subdivision surface modifier so these are the points that you're actually looking for when you wait paint another thing is that you can see there are no vertices going through the pivot point for our jaw it's kind of like right in the middle so i'm actually going to go into edit mode right here and i'm going to add a loop cut like right there and that's going to go all the way around and it's also going to cut through our mouth a little too like that it's a little hard to see but you can see it's going all the way around all right then back into weight paint mode we can get started you can see your brush settings by going over here to active tool and workplace settings and you can see our weight is set to one i also want to make sure symmetry is turned on it should be fine because we're using a mirror modifier anyway but i like to turn that on and then under options make sure auto normalize is checked and that's just going to make sure that your vertex groups aren't really fighting for influence over anything all right so now i'll just get started i'm going to start with the head you can select the head right here it looks like we're not in pose mode so make sure you're in pose mode select your head then you can control click your head right there i'm just going to put everything in here so to do that you can hit t to open this up and use the gradient like this but there's also a shortcut if you just have the brush selected and hit alt and then left click it will let you use the gradient also so i like to do that to just fill everything so now everything is attached to the head over here then we can choose our jaw like this and i'm just going to start hitting some of these vertices where i think our jaw should be so i'm just trying to choose the things that are closest to our jaw and you can just set all of these to a weight of one and we're going to skip over the lip area because we have bones specifically for our lips okay so you don't have to worry about those right now if you want to change your brush size you can hit f like that alright i think we have everything we need for our jaw and another cool thing about if you have lock object modes turned off is with your bone selected you can hit r and see what it's moving so it looks like it's kind of weird right here and i think it just deforms better when the armature modifier is before the subdivision surface and now it's looking a little better so now we can select our lip bone right here and we can start painting things in i'm just gonna hide our teeth so we can see a little better and also our mirror modifier it'll make it easier to see so i'm just gonna start painting these all red and you can hit the middle line too just make sure that they all have a value of one so they should all be completely red and also make sure you hit this spot right here because right now that's controlled by just the head bone all right now we can select our top lip bone and we can start painting also right there just grab all the spots for the top lip and right now this is not controlling the middle point at all any of these points right here bottom lip is controlling all of them what i want is for the top and the bottom lip to share the middle point and that's where auto normalize really comes in is because if we select the top right here and change this to 0.5 i can start adding a weight of 0.5 to the middle and you can see when i switch to the bottom lip now these points are also green and that's what auto normalize does before when i was setting up the weights for the bottom lip i painted all of these completely red so they all had a value of one so when i add weights to this bone it's actually being taken away from the bottom bone that's what i mean when i say they're not going to uh the vertex groups they're not going to fight with each other when you add weight to one it takes it away from the other basically so now when we move our head everything should move because these bones are parented to it we can move the jaw select the bottom lip at the same time with shift click and that's moving also and the top lip is moving also so that's looking pretty good all right so now we can turn off lock object modes and go back into object mode and i'm also going to turn wireframe off just so we can see a little better all right so we still need to set up the weights for our teeth so instead of going back into weight paint mode i'm going to do this slightly different so i'm just going to select the top teeth and i want these to be parented to the head bone so you can go over here to object data properties find the head bone right here you can go into edit mode just make sure that everything is selected with a and just hit assign when you do that make sure that head is selected and you have a weight of one and this is basically the same thing as weight painting you're just going about it a different way and we can do the same thing for our bottom teeth just go into edit mode make sure everything is selected and i want these to be parented to the jaw so make sure you have jaw selected and then hit assign so now that everything is deforming properly we can add some bone constraints and this is just going to make it so these are a little easier to control so what i want to do is make it so that when i move the jaw that the bottom lip automatically is just moving with it so you can select the bottom lip bone right here and go over to bone constraint properties and i'm going to add a copy location and a copy rotation so i want this to copy the location and rotation of the jaw so select armature and then jaw and now when we move this just the location you can see it's following it and when we rotate it um you know it's not being followed so we can set it up for the copy rotation also armature jaw and right now it's going to snap to be the same exact rotation which we don't want and that's because we're using world space for the target and the owner if we change these to local it'll work fine and if we try to rotate it you can see it's kind of locked there if we want to be able to move it separately you just have to change mix to after original like that so now we can move it like this or you can rotate it from the jaw like that and if you want either of these to be turned off there's these influence spots right here like that for the copy location i like to leave these set to world space i feel like it works fine and also when everything is at its like reset zero position i want the mouse to be completely closed so i'm actually going to go into edit mode for the head and i'm going to select the lips right here just like that and i'm just going to scale these on the z axis until the mouth looks closed so they're actually going to go past each other a little and that's just because of the subdivision surface modifier so now our lips look closed visually i also want to make it so that our jaw stops at a certain point and it doesn't go through you know itself it doesn't go too high and i also don't want to let it go too far like that so we can do that pretty easily we just select the jawbone and add in a limit rotation right here and we want to set this owner from world space to local space like that and i want to limit this on the x rotation the minimum is 0 which is what we're at right now and i'm just going to change the maximum to something like 30. so you can see when we rotate it now on the x-axis at a certain point it will stop but you can see even though i'm stopping right here the numbers will still change up here in the rotation and i don't want that to make it not do that you can check effect transform you can see when the jaw stops these numbers will stop also and that just makes it easier to keyframe so you don't accidentally set your frames to have values that are beyond where you would need to go really so now our mouth will snap shut like that and not go too far and it also won't open too wide which is nice i also want to be able to make the lips be closed while the jaw is moving like if we wanted this character to be chewing something with their mouth closed so the way you can do that is adding a copy location and copy rotation to the top lip also so we can just set those to copy the jaw and the same thing for the copy rotation you just want to make sure that this is using after original and set this to local space just like our bottom lip so now if we move this you can see it's kind of like a chewing motion like that and it works for rotation also and if you want it to be just like it was before you can just turn the influence down like that and it'll work like normal all right i want our character to be able to like purse their lips as if they're like whistling or something like that and also smile and frown so instead of adding deforming bones to do that i'm going to go back into object mode and i'm going to add some shape keys to the head so you can just select the head and over where the vertex groups are there's this other spot called shape keys and you can just hit this plus button and the basis is basically just like our regular mesh so if you edit anything in the basis it's just like it's editing the original mesh basically so we want to hit this plus button again and this will add our first shape key and we can name this to like lips purse like that and when you have this selected you can go into edit mode and just kind of move the vertices wherever you want them to be so i'm going to select the edge of the mouth right there and i'm just going to move this over to the center like that and i also want it to be forward quite a bit more i think that's looking pretty good so now if we go back into object mode you can see our original mouth is back and why is that well you can kind of blend between your original shape and the shape key with this value right here you just want to select your shape key and then turn the value up like that so now we have the option to do that i also want to make this person smile and frown so i'm going to add another shape key and i'm just going to call that smile we can go into edit mode and we still have the corner of the mouth selected so we can pretty much just drag this up like that until we get a good smile going and when we exit it's back to normal and you can see we can blend into that like this and if you wanted to frown instead of making a separate shape key for that you can just change this range minimum to negative one and it's basically just going to do the same thing but in the opposite direction like that so now we have a frown also and you can mix the shape keys together like that what i'm going to do next is add some drivers to these so that we can control them with bones because when you're in pose mode you have no access to the shape keys so basically what i'm going to do is go into edit mode for our armature and i'm going to add in a new bone with shift a you can see it added in a new bone right here and i'm just going to rotate that negative 90 degrees like this and i'll put that over here i'll make this so it's parented to the head bone and keep offset and i don't want this to be a deforming bone so i'm just going to turn this off and we can also make this a little smaller right here that should be fine i'm going to call this a control lips because this is going to control the shape keys for our lips and i'll just put it in front of the lips right here and you can see the z is pointing down and i want the z to be pointing up so it's oriented correctly so you can just change the roll value to zero because it was at 180. all right so now that we have this we can go back into object mode and go back to our shape keys for our head and i'm going to select our shape key for lip purse right here and right click the value and add driver like that and you can see it's red right here it's looking for an object to copy so we can select the bone we just made and we named that control lips so it's looking for a change in location which we want um and it looks like this we want it to be changing on the y i want to change the shape key when it moves in this motion right here and that's the y axis for the bone so we can go back to edit driver and change this to y location instead of world space we'll change it to local space like that so now we can go back into pose mode and when we move this in the y direction you can see it's blending through our shape key until it stops like that and you can see it also doesn't go below zero like that so i'm actually going to add a constraint to our bone right here so it only moves a certain distance we can do a limit location and i'll just turn all of these on and also change this to local space and now it's back where it's supposed to be so i want this to move in the positive y direction so i can change this to something like 0.2 let's see how that looks so it'll only move this far now which i think is good but it's not actually turning our shape key all the way on because this is only moving 0.2 and has to move one unit for the shape key to turn on all the way but we can affect that over here basically just edit the driver and in this expression right here we can just multiply it by five because point two times five is 1. so now when this moves you can see over here in the y location when this moves 0.2 units this is up all the way you can see the mouth is all the way closed now and we can use the same bone for our smile and frown shape key uh so i'm just gonna go over to the bone constraint again and make sure this can move on the z axis like that so i want it to move down by negative point one and up by point one let's see how that looks so this is going to be the range of motion right there and we can just go back to our head right here to look at our shape key i'm just gonna copy this driver with right click and add the same one to our smile shape key paste driver so we have this moving in the positive and negative direction just like our shape key but it's still not working because we still have it set to use the y direction which we don't want so we can edit the driver we have to change this to z location and because this is only moving point one in either direction we have to change the amount from times five to times ten because point one times ten is one so it's either going to be negative one or positive one at its maximum and minimum like that and you can blend between the shape keys by moving it on either axis like that so this should let us change our expression all in here without touching the shape key panel i also want to be able to turn the influence for our top lip on and off without coming over here and changing both of these and so i'm going to go back into edit mode and duplicate this and we're going to do the same thing where we make drivers but it's going to be for keeping our lips shut or open so i'll just put that right here and i'll call this a control shut and you can see because we duplicated this we have the limit location on which is fine but i don't need it to move on the y axis just up and down like that i'm going to change the maximum y back to zero and i also don't want this to go into the negative i'll just have it set to zero and we'll change this to point two all right and i want this to move uh down but i want it to be a positive value so i'm going to go back into edit mode and just change this roll right here to 180 and you can see when i do that the local z-axis is pointing down so that means that this is moving it in the positive like that and i think that's moving a little too far i can just change that to 0.1 like that and now all we have to do is basically just set up these drivers like we did with the shape keys so you can add a driver right here for object armature and the bone we just made control shut and we just have to multiply this by 10 because we set our location to point one this i want to match the z location in the local space so if i move this and then push this down now it's matching the location so we want to do the same thing for the rotation so i'm just going to copy the driver and paste it right here and now it's controlling the rotation also so now if i want i can go from talking like that very quickly to chewing like this all right and that's all there is to it really so you can do some pretty cool things with this rig you can rotate from the jaw or you can move it like this you can expose the teeth like that and if you move the jaw forward you can do some interesting faces like this you can also scale the lips like that which could be good for if you're trying to do like an f noise something like like that if you're trying to make the character look like they're whistling you could just scale the lips up like that or rotate them around you could expose the teeth and make the character smile like that if you rotate these on the y-axis you can make them smart too like that so yeah this rig is easy to control and would allow you to do quite a lot of stuff it would be pretty good for lip syncing too alright that's it for this one if you have any blender tips or any suggestions for another video leave a comment below thanks for watching have a good one you

Channel: Joey Carlino

Views: 41,117

Keywords: blender, cg, cgi, blender 2.9

Id: 6nmT123wVe4

Length: 30min 37sec (1837 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 22 2021