Hi guys hope you are doing well. Today
we will be looking at face rigging. I've prepared a project and made
three faces, so we will be looking at three complexities: simple, medium and complex. I'm using mostly the simple one but
sometimes I also go with medium. If you are new to this channel we are animating
2D characters for games using Spine 2D tool. Let me actually switch to that program,
here's it and these are our faces. From left to right we have
simple, medium and complex rig. You can see that this video is super long, it's basically an extended version of my
previous video about 3d face. But i think I added some new stuff at the end and even though
i'm not using it, I mostly use the first version, but I think you will learn something. If you
are an experienced animator just skip ahead or maybe ignore this video at all. Okay that's it
let me hide the bone so you can see the result. Now let's break it down. Before starting the rigging process let me show
you some stuff. Let me actually unhide some bones. So the first one uses merged head image, While the other two use cut down images, you
can see the parts separately so this is the benefit of the first one, you go with a
merged face and with much simpler mesh. While in this situation you get much more details. Okay now I'm going to create a clean version of this and we'll
start from the simple one. Let's see. Well you can see that I have duplicated the first
rig, I've reverted all meshes I left this bone, controller one, that contains eyes and
mouth. It's not gonna be exactly the same way as I did in previous one because I had it meshed,
but this time I will go without meshing it. So for now as you can see this bone just
moves all in one plane and we need to keep it that way so for that we need that
face to support that idea let's let's mesh it. We don't create over complicated vertices. If you see some flow lines that have logical
lines to be meshed like nose or eyebrow, Don't mesh them until you really need
it. Less vertices better performance. Thus I'll have this section plain. For that I need to create this kind of
section to complement that bone movement. I have created it, now let's go back and bind
it to the bones, root bone and controller bone. This ring is a loop, let's
bind it to the controller bone. Very ugly of course, but if we do some little
tricks, I will also add values to the edge. Add some points here to give
this part a little bit 3D look and let's see if that improves something Yes i think I've finished, yeah. It's not very flexible, you can
see that it helps out a little bit, but if we make it very small for example if
you have a character appearing in the game not that big you can see that it does a pretty nice
job for like three minutes or four minutes rig. And you can see that right now the eye can
move over the nose so if that's the case you can just cut also the nose and create a layering exactly the
same way as the mouth is here. Also make sure to not just move this, but also
use rotation, because sometimes with this rig, moving is not enough, so you have to scale
or maybe rotate or sometimes even shear it, to squeeze everything from it. Well basically
this is it, so let's move to the second one. Moving to the second rig. I have
also duplicated the face and reverted all meshes, just left four bones two for eye bones one will be our controller and the last
one will be moving opposite to controller with the help of our constraints.
Let's do constraint first. I´ve selected this bone and created a constraint.
Now I need to select a target so I click this bone and after that with some settings here this
bone will start to follow the controller. Let's hit match that will save the distance
between two bones and let's mark what we want to follow. I'm going to add minus 100 for
X and minus 100 for Y value This way it moves exactly the opposite so this
is going to imitate the back side of the head The eye bones are going to be
also constrained to this bone. I will add random names, again hitting
match button to store the distance and let's give some 80% approximately, I'm going to modify that
later. Similarly let's do it for this side, generate a random name, store
the distance, and let's see. You can see that the eyes are staying behind
because they are following only with 80% value So this is the first step that I would do.
In second rig we just constrain eye bone Inner parts of the eye will just follow eye bone. While in the last rig inner parts
also being affected by the controller Thus the shape of the eye will change.
We will come back to this rig. Okay now we have moving eyes we need to
create a mesh for face, this time you can see that i have part separated,
this will give me more freedom. And since this is more complex rig we can create more complex meshes since every slice of
the face will be affected differently. Don't go too crazy, it should be detailed
but not realistic. I will try to do tiny bit detailed. it's important to isolate the edge of the art,
especially when it it has some outlines like this. For that I would go and create another ring
inside, just to have better control over it. Otherwise they stretch or break. We don't need this part so even
those points are not necessary. But we need here some extra vertices, because
the eyebrow is going to move and we will be expanding this section to give some 3d effect
it's not necessary but better to have it. This is extreme case If the eyebrow would go here
and wrap the head the other side I would most probably cut the
eyebrows in separate layers and move them separately so this way I saw this gap and
thought I could go there and create a separation. Let's create another eyebrow mesh. Pay attention at this cheek wrinkle. It is very important to keep the face realistic. If you break those lines,
face will get very distorted. Same goes with the chin. I would add one point here to
give more 3d or maybe two points. Similarly here, let me go up a little bit. okay let's see what we have. Maybe here or something If you are bored just skip ahead I just
don't want to fast forward this section, maybe people are just starting using Spine and
they really need it. I will mark the sections, so please be patient or skip forward if if you
are really familiar with these techniques. Now I would also need control
over here and forehead. I'm going to revise them later I need to
see how they work with the controllers. maybe I will need some ring here but I am not
adding it now, I will see if I can go without it. Let's also mesh this I will be quick here,
since this is a little bit 3D and not flat maybe we need to add more lines here
to be able to move them and give nice 3d look Let's also do this. Same would go here this part is
going to shorten and hair is thick In that case I would add another line here. And that will allow me to move this
ring, which will give nice 3D touch. If you want to select the line or an
edge, you can hold shift and click, it will select the the whole ring, it will flow to the next point through this line
and will stop at the cross section. I use this a lot when i create
rings on the nose or on the eyes. If you are going to open and close the mouth,
or make transitions between different mouth types. I would suggest also meshing inner part. let me show you what I mean so this way you
could actually manipulate the teeth separately. Without isolating teeth it would look
distorted when we open or close the mouth Okay, let's also mesh the nose I think this is enough. okay let's also quickly do the ear, nothing
to do complex here, separate this part. Also do this one Yes, now let's see what we have here, so I have
removed this side of the hair, I'm going to use this part, because I want to turn the face to his
left side a little bit more than we have here, and you can see when we turn it too
much this section appears empty. So I use this part, but since right now it
shouldn't be visible I leave it here for now, and when I finish the ring I will bind it in a
different pose, when the head is in this position. So let's mash it and I will be back to
this binding and explain it at the end. I'm not going to rig the eyes,
I will just leave them closed. I will rig the eyes in the
last rig, since here it is very straightforward, the eye will be isolated
in this bone and nothing inside the eye will behave differently, so
everything will follow this bone. I think we miss also this. let's do it. let's see what we miss here, I will filter meshes and bones, then will go and select
this one and see, we have missed this one which I will do very quickly. We have missed this one, let's leave
it this way and that's it yeah. Let's disable filters and
start binding the meshes. I will start from the face, previously I've
added transform constraints for the eyes. They are very strong guidelines for me, where
the face should go. So in this case I will just enter animation mode and create an animation, create a loop, and we will start binding it. In setup I will bind on
controller and the opposite bone, give it full to the opposite or
controller, it doesn't matter. Let's also bind this. And this, And everything else what we have meshed. I will skip this one for now i'm going to bind it later yeah everything is done so you can go and start
painting it using the Add tool. I would always increase the feather, reduce the strength of the brush,
select all points, pink one is the back side of the head. We will need to paint with blue
one let's paint front of the face. It's not gonna look nice yet. but be patient. Always animate, move the frame so you can
see and go quickly over all adjustments so you can see the picture quickly,
don't polish one part to the end. Just move quickly. It may look very easy as I do, but I have a lot
of experience of doing it so you you need to get your own experience. Don't be scared believe me you will learn it, don't use
brush if it looks complicated, you can go and use direct weighting, but please don't be
scared, if you need any help you can find us in this discord channel I think everyone there,
who has experienced would love to help beginners. I think we have a great community, very helpful. You can see I jump from brushing to direct editing
and at the end you will see that I only use direct weighting, because with brush you
can easily do batch modifications, but when most of it is done doing tiny adjustment
it's much much easier with direct mode. You can see that i'm concentrating only
on this pose of the head after that I will also fix the other pose, right now the head
only comes forward and moves to the right. After I fix this I will try
to move more to the left. It's very tedious work you need to be patient. And believe your skills. Even now I don't see that it's becoming
a good result but I know after some time I will have something nice. I already see that I need some more
vertices here and here is the gap that I was worried about, you can see that we can
push the eyebrow without disturbing this outline. So this comes with experience if you are new you may be wondering "how would I know", but after some time you start
developing some kind of feeling. It's everywhere, whenever you
get experience you become better. You can see that all meshes are moving except the
eyes, they are just moving with their root bones. so we we can close this gap by just
adding new vertices to the face mesh I would not touch the eye meshes looking good, similarly would go here let's update the bindings And try to close this gap close, I
don't like the eye, it comes too much to this point, in this case we can
move it less than the other eye. It's not fully correct, but anyway it is not
possible to use just transforms and achieve full 3d effect. Now, let's see in animation
what we like, lets also align it with y-axis and also let's move this one,
let's give it a less value yes I think I like it, you can see
that one eye is smaller than the other, it's just a limitation of 2d. When artists start
drawing they will draw in a nice pose of course, they want it to be beautiful, nice
pose means face is in perspective eyes are different sizes. You can see that from
the holes, this one is smaller than the other and it creates huge problems when you want to create
a nice looking 3d. So you have to solve it. With every face you get new challenges, there is
no one way to solve everything just be aware some face may have horns some would carry hats
some would have maybe very small eyes etc. okay let's now work on this gap, adjust with
the eye. i think we are okay with this gap yeah, we are totally fine. you can see
that we we didn't even touch the nose, now here I forgot to apply transform values,
we have key, but we need to move the values to the setup pose. for that I will just remember 46
and 72 for the other one. let's add this values 72 72 and i think it was this
one no we have already done it bad naming, just make all everything
difficult fast, but difficult at the end. so it goes back to six. yeah i remember
let's remove the keys. yes let's fix this What's wrong with you Why can't I fix this Yeah we are fine here, let's also
put the nose in right position. Okay I'm looking at this section, it has to connect
to the forehead obviously. and i'm looking to nostrils and the tip the other part
will flow properly if we fix all this. Also we need this. let me fix this it's super easy I wish I had some sculpting skills then I
would kill this task. I feel sometimes I struggle to find the correct shape. This is
very important, the more quality you put in the rig more skills of drawing or sculpting
you will need. Let's see the eyebrows, they need to be equal size
since the face is fully frontal. And this eyebrow can expand a little bit okay I think we... Oh no we've missed
the hairs, let's quickly adjust them. I think we lost all of our experienced
animator here. If you are here you either have a lot of time or you will just join to this
community and working your way out to become a great animator with spine. I wish you good luck, I
really really do want you to succeed in this path. And i would suggest quickly find the way
to the community because we are helpful And yeah you can also find me on discord as the
other animators I think most of us are there. Once in a while helping each other.
Let's push it back Go away baldness. I think i will need to move this
hair it narrows the head too much. Yes i'm fine with this side
I'm fine with the front okay we have a problem here they are overlapping. let's check these It's so hard to understand where
those cheekbones are going. This is where i need sculpting skills. And you
can see that eye is floating in the socket, I don't like it, I really really don't like it. So let's try to find another value for the eye,
66 for example. Let's copy that and put it here. Remove the key and we have a new hole, will leave
the eye here and close the gap, I think we have the last thing remaining which will be this part.
As I said I want to bind it at this moment when the head is visible so when it goes back it will
deform accordingly, for that I will move it here. I will transfer this deformation to the setup
so we we avoid creating deform keys here somehow it affects performance Let's assume we are happy with this. I will
select all vertices with box selection, copy vertex position and go back here and
select again all vertices and paste it here. We need to keep the order of the vertices as
selected previously, otherwise they will mess up. See I didn't bind it previously just to be able
to bind it in animation. Now we are binding it to these two bones. When we move it back we can
accordingly align it as we did with other parts okay I see something is off but i don't understand Some parts are floating but I don't want to spend forever here we
need to move forward with the other rig. Let's fix the mouth i think yes so let's sum it up so we have one
controller we have a head that moves of course i don't have much time
you can see that hair is not looking properly but it depends how much time you
want to spend here so improve as you have time basically you got the idea. The other thing I want
to mention that if you want to go with this flat rig then you want to have this ability when bones move opposite way while here it
does not move at all. It makes controlling a little bit difficult But I don't know it depends
what you want to achieve. So we have middle bone that will contain both of these bones one is basically
controller that we left untouched and this one will be as opposite bone, we are not
going to use constraint here, instead we will be just using a scale inheritance option so now that I scale
it you can see that everything works. So nice... Just looks like cartoon character.
I'm going to do also here something it's awesome, I never tried.
What if we scale on one axis . okay let's see. let's not spend too much time here. okay so I will deselect the scale here, for
this children bones and now when I scale it you can see that this one moves this
way and this one moves the opposite way so we somehow achieve that effect
if we scale in one direction It behaves exactly the same way.
Maybe programmatically it behaves differently, but we can achieve similar results we will need
also to disable rotation. if we want to move perfectly, without snapping. and up and down so this is just to avoid
constraints. okay let's move to the final one.
this one will be a little bit longer so I'm going to cut some part maybe I'm not
going to mesh. it's basically the same. And parts are exactly the same. I have just
new part introduced at the top of the head. But everything else is exactly
the same. I will just show how this works I am not doing it from scratch maybe some part. Because this video is already passing an hour mark, so let's avoid
that. okay let's see, and we are at the third rig. i'm going to explain this rather than
do from scratch it will take two hours from me. please just see how it works, I think you will
understand whatever question you have just ask me in the comments i will explain. everything what you want so just to not make
this video longer and not torture myself. okay before starting I want to
say that I mostly go with this face it's super quick super easy and
it covers most of things. If I use like big characters of course i
will think about moving to this rig but mostly I do this one, so I never did this
I tried this first time I saw similar technique for the dog one russian guy did it, and I liked
it, I actually wanted to try on the face and it come up very nice looking, one thing that i
want to say you, if you want to go with this one. make sure you have a nice drawing skills or
understanding perspective, the shape or sculpting skills. It would really help you because I
gave me freedom to move all vertices whatever I want but I ended up not understanding
how to move them. how the chin will behave.
be careful when you pick this and also there are a lot of constraints here So basically we have one circle, this
one, let me enable that circle, here is it and we can rotate that bone and it
rotates like in its local position it doesn't know that it's scaled because we
scaled the parent so this is the normal state of the circle I scaled it i rotated it correspondingly, and after that i started to bind but before
scaling and rotating i placed these bones the yellow ones so i rotated this way and i aligned those points
to the nose, eyes and ears and after that i scaled them and positioned exactly like this and started to weight them so nothing really
special just in this case we have very powerful bones this line and the one at the back this one
we can add as many as we want to give more details in this case we just have one for
the back side you can see here cheekbone or eye and nose we
could go and add another bone here and another bone here to complete this, but i didn't go
into more details here although sometimes i really need those two missing bones, anyway so when we
have those bones you can see they are rotating circular way, in 3d, we have freedom of binding the mesh whatever we want so if you
see this mesh you can bind directly to this bone and once it comes to this side you bind it to this
so binding is very tedious and very difficult for me i'm not going to bind it again
but basically i explained it this section would be bound to this let's also see the overlay color and now let's check the eyes this is the first rig that when we rotate the
head the eye shape change the eyelids are changing so apart from they are bound to this
up and down blinking bone you can see the section of the eyes are also bound to these
bones as the rest face so i did only the edge to not disturb the up and down movement
otherwise it would like distort everything here so this way we have the blinking functionality
while also keeping the perspective the rotation and yeah since we have ability to
move the head down we would expose our bold head so that's i went and modified some parts of the top part of the head and yes that's
it for this rig it was very quick to explain it i'm pretty sure if you are new you may not
understand how i did the circular stuff but please find me in community and under
comments i will be happy to help to explain we will set up a call i will explain
everything what i did i'm thinking about sharing also this project i'm not sure about it
because the art is not mine and i don't know how people will react on this but let me sometime
i will think about it maybe i will share the art also before leaving you i want to share another
technique that i tried before this i wanted to not complicate this much because i understand
this is not realistic nobody is gonna use this so i wanted to do another way to similar way but
much easier i ended up finding one solution but i didn't use this i think it's not ready yet
i'm experimenting with it so we have bones, one controller, these bones are just targets of ik chains and you can see that
at some point one of them starts to slow down and the nose will continue moving until
one point so you can imagine the face when we move it frontal everything overlaps and when we move it this way again nose is overlapping
to the face but at some point nose will poke up so this is another technique i'm not sure
is it useful or not but just sharing with you okay this is it let me know in the comments
this video was super long so i want to know your reactions your feedback on this should i continue
making this long videos or it's too long to invest in this and also i want to say that i
have enabled ads on this channel to experiment and see if i can earn some revenue so if you
see ads on my video please be understanding i'm just experimenting i don't expect anything real like just experimenting with youtube
to see how it works everything so that's it thank you for watching if you are still here
from the start it was a great journey thank you for watching um let me know what you
want to see next in the comments or just wait i will find something interesting and
prepare a new video okay cheers bye guys
