Quickly Rig Simple Character Faces (Blender 2.9 Tutorial)

[Music] okay hello so i have this scene that i created here with with just this base mesh with this head and um this is not rigged at all it's just a it's just a mesh and it's just a character with a with the mouth open and ready to animate um so as opposed to putting a bunch of bones in here to make the make the eyes be able to look around and make the mouth shut i want to do all that i want to do all that animating with shape keys because i sort of find that that's like a uh an easier uh less intensive way of animating um so let's just sort of jump right into that so basically all you have to do is you have your you have your face here i'm gonna add a shape key bam that's the basis if you're familiar with shape keys you uh you should probably you should know this part but basically if you're not all this means is hey this is sort of like the base shape we're starting from and we're gonna we're gonna move from there um so i'm gonna add another shape key this is going to be the first one that is the first deformation and this one's going to be our blank we'll start with the blank bam we're going to rename it blank and i'm going to go into edit mode here with blank make sure blink is selected and then i can just start moving my points around here to be the shape of the blank i want i want it to be might take a little bit of adjusting to get it there but i think once i sort of have it in the right spot it'll look nice okay i like how that looks i think um i tab out of edit mode and it's gone but really it's just now being affected by the slider so right here where this is value you can just sort of go from zero to one and you can interpolate between those two shapes so cool we have our blank rigged up essentially now i will add another shape key and we'll call this mouth closed all right when i go into edit mode here again same as last time we will have mouth closed selected and then i can just move it into position of how i want that to be so i'll move this up a little bit and again make sure you fine-tune your mesh make it make it look the way you want it to look whenever it's closed so shut that keep this going up like i said it might just take a couple of adjustments but eventually you'll get it looking right and get it looking the way you want to i might even pull these teeth down a little bit yeah oops yeah pull the teeth down a little bit and then i can shut the mouth even more cool the mouth is closed and then if i go from zero to one on the slider over here on the value slider yeah mouth closes and opens so these are these are good we could we could essentially go ahead and just keyframe these and then you know go down the line and keyframe it that way um and that gets the job done if i hit play it'll do its thing but i i like to take it a step further and rig these up with bones because i find if you're animating your character already using the armature you might as well have these controls built in directly into the armature right so let's go ahead and let's do that so with our head selected i will add an armature and i'll just add a single bone your case you might have a full rig already built um but it's okay because you can just keep on adding to that rig and you can add more bones so scale this one down here and first thing we'll do is apply that scale and i'm going to go ahead and rig a parent this to the bone just with the bone here okay so if i go here into pose mode everything is rigged up to this one bone so far because i move this bone around everything's going to move but if i go into edit mode of the bones and i will add a new bone and i'll move this one up and then let me scale this down sure okay right here this is good i like to keep all my control bones above the head just because i find it to be easier that way um there's a couple things you can do you could parent this to that bone i like to leave it separate so when i go to pose mode if i'm moving this guy around the top one is not affected and it's easier that way to sort of access and also see what access you're moving along so i'm going to select this bone here in edit mode this top bone and we're going to just go through and name this so this one is going to affect the blink so i'll name this bone specifically blink bam so when i go back into object mode select my original mesh i can grab my shape key section and where it says blink here's where we're going to work with adding a driver and drivers are really not that complex but they seem these they're a little daunting at first just like everything in blender but you know you realize it's not that bad so blink go to the value we right click here and we just add a driver it's that simple and this driver properties adds up if you if your mouse or like falls out of it it goes away that's okay just hover over again right click and edit driver it'll come right back so first thing we're going to do is we're going to down here versus object select what is going to drive it and that's going to be our armature and then specifically under amateur we'll select the bone that we want to drive this one which is blink so there it's going to for where the blink is on the x-axis or the x location it will drive this value i like to change this here to local space because otherwise if it's not in local space if it's a world space as i move this thing around in in the world space it will as you can see let me go into render view if the whole thing moves in the world space it will start to blink and that's not really what we want um we really want that to only affect whenever we're in pose mode so to do that all we have to do is change this driver remember right click and edit the driver again and just change it back to local space and that will get the job done so we can go into pose mode here grab this bone and now we're moving the head all around and then we grab the blank bone and then if we want to animate that to the right we just move the bone this way blink so that's pretty far but we can actually change these axes here in a minute so it doesn't go that far but that it's totally standalone and you can use that in the animation section so wake up all the bones hit a alt r to reset the rotation alt g to reset the position and we're going to go back here we're going gonna do the exact same thing just affect the mouth closed so if i tab into edit mode on the bones i'll duplicate the blink and bring it up one and now this one here we can rename this bone to mouth closed bang all right now we're going to follow the same steps we did before it's that simple go in here grab our mouth closed shape key right click on the value and add a driver and we can drive it again with the armature but rather this time we'll drive it with the mouth closed section and then x location good in local space now you'll notice this happens sometimes is a little glitch with blender where it'll still say it's red that it's not working and if you grab it to move from pose mode if you start moving this it doesn't actually close the mouth i don't know why this is the case but just make sure you just save save your file go to file and then revert and then it should work then it's a little glitch in blender but um it gets the job done so just always basically close the project and reopen it and you're good to go so yeah i guess one last thing we can do here to get this looking right is we can we can fix this interpolation so over here we can change this here we can edit this driver so if we wanted so the blinks a little far remember if we go over here we select this and we go to pose mode and we want to grab our blank we have to move the whole way what seems like the the whole way to one over here which is just a little far in my opinion um just for the size of this rig this will all also change too based on how big is the rig you're working with um so so just whatever your own whatever you'd like it to be so i want to go like to about here i think that's that's a decent distance for the blank and then you can see up here in this region whenever i do that again you can see it says um it says 0.2 on the x-axis so that's all the further i want to go it's 0.2 so to give it the full distance so if i go to the blank right click here and edit this driver really we just want this is the expression here that we want to work with so it basically just means the variable is the value so we can do anything to this because we want it to be 0.2 we really want to amplify this so as we go to 0.2 it's essentially one which is five times bigger because if you go to 0.2 that would be you know point four point six point eight up to one so we really wanna take the variable times five and this will amplify our our expression five times whenever i grab the blank and i move it to the right put to 0.2 that's fully blanked okay i wanted to go into a little more detail on why the variable driver works the way it does just because it might be a little confusing if it's the first time you're using it so we see that expression where it says var plus 0.0 and really what that what that means is that it's kind of like back in math class where when you had the y equals m x plus b right in this case um we have like b is here x is here and there's actually like a hidden m right here um and that is basically just one in this case so um really it's an xy graph is what we need to look at it like so when we when we go down here we have to think of it in terms of this so um we have this xy graph right and y this value is sort of this y value versus x is sort of this is how much from 0 to one is is the shape key being applied and this x is this side of the value over here it's this var so in this case really y just equals x and that that's what would make sense because that's the first thing you give it because if variable is x right if this is 1 and that's just y equals x plus b and if b is 0 that's just essentially right here y equals x so let me erase this stuff just okay so again in this case y just equals x right as you bring x from zero to one on that scale it's going to go from zero to one on the shape key which makes sense right but in this case we really only wanted to go to about point two which is like right here so you'd have like one two three four five which is actually you know point two point four point six point eight and then one so because we only wanna go to here on this graph right that's like five times more intense and we know from algebra that to get this graph to go from here to here well that's actually something like y equals five x plus zero so basically that means we have to multiply x by 5. this is the mathematical side behind why this works and if you put this sort of into practice you can make any interpolation you want using this graph [Music] you

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Keywords: rigging a face blender 2.9, Blender Character Face Rigging Tutorial, How To Rig A Face In Blender, blender face rigging tutorial, Blender Character Facial Rigging Tutorial, How To Make A Face Rig In Blender, blender 2.9 rigging tutorial, How To Rig In Blender 2.9, How To Use Shape Keys In Blender 2.9, How To Rig With Shape Keys in Blender, Face Rig Tutorial, Blender face rig tutorial, Blender Face Rig Shape Keys, Blender Shape Keys, Shape Key Rigging, blender tutorial

Id: uWWCPPg6T_g

Length: 13min 0sec (780 seconds)

Published: Sun Nov 22 2020