Hello guys today i want to talk about head
turn in 3d space in spine with 2d characters so it's not actually professional video on how
exactly you need to do to approach a nice 3d turn or pseudo 3d. Rigging the face is pretty much time consuming so before you start, it's
better to think about how it's going to look. if you are given the freedom of creativity and you
have to think about if you should use 3d turn or no I really suggest thinking before starting
it. sometimes you just spend a lot of time on it and do actually pretty nice 3d rig and later
you just understand that character is going to appear very small in the game or it's just a
secondary character that appears once in the game or it it's not gonna
have many animations of turning the head So maybe you could go with
directly deforming the meshes in the animation I usually do in two ways. one is for
better performance on mobile games where There are a lot of characters in the scene so if the character is one in the scene, on mobile devices you will be
fine using mesh deforms, but if there are a lot of characters in the scene and this is
going to be shipped on the mobile you definitely don't need to use any constraints any mesh deformation keys
or if even you are using them please warn about it developers it's really costly making additional constraints just for some final touches.
let's start with the first one, the simpler one that i use to do very quick rig, with one controller it actually looks pretty nice and it doesn't use any constraints. for simple rig i just create a bone and put
whatever bones i have on the face inside. the idea is to take the face and move it
right and left without touching the back side of the head this rig doesn't use any constraints
so it's very cheap performance wise and it's very quick to do. so follow me i think i can
do it in several minutes let's create a bone and give it an icon and maybe a nice color,
next i will just add those bones and yeah they are going to move in the same
plane, the face will look flat but i think it's it's worth doing this way for simple
characters and games that needs to be optimized . okay so i think i control all the bones i have.
Next will be just binding this mesh, but before binding, note that iI have removed the nose I merged
it with the face since it's not going to move separately it is on the same layer
as eyes and the mouth so i merged them we will be working with one face piece and and you may notice that it's a little bit complex for this simple rig maybe we can make another mesh much simpler, considering the performance. let's give it a quick mesh add some inside some lines to not break the outlines maybe another inner ring which can flow with the face i don't think it's going to do too much effect on the final result. let's try this way, let's bind this bone to this mesh first i will give full control
to this bone and maybe later just select this points and give full control to this part yeah i think we are very close and
the last thing maybe some fixing here and i think adding also the hat using same steps,
just select this front part and give it high value i think also the the
other parts will also have some value, higher than normal Let's see what we have we can play with this edge. I'm not doing very detailed just to be quick. This is very simple rig it shouldn't be
difficult to do it yourself so i yeah that's it let's also fix these hairs maybe they can
have them spherical effect on the head yeah you can see on the preview outline
window in the bottom right corner it's usable it's not perfect but it's usable. Note that we did this rig with just one bone without constraints Also with simple rig I have reduced meshe vertices count i would want to say also that
i was talking about two ways of rigging but of course there is
another way, without rig you can just deform the mesh directly in the
animation like for example let's create a test and imagine that we don't have this bone
and we just directly want to transform. so we select this tool, it's
basically a brush that moves vertices with some fade out effect. with it you just directly deform here and also move the bones
so just in those cases when the character has like bunch of animations but only one animation
is actually using the head 3d, no need to make a rig for face for just one animation, i think
better to just mesh it here and deform the mesh but remember that this is performance heavy so
avoid it if the character is going to be rendered a lot in the same screen let's move to the next one so before starting the second rig, i would like to talk about the head shape in 3d space so we can see what we actually do in the spine
let me switch to the photoshop okay i have a head from the top so first thing i just divide
the head into two pieces, let's assume we have a line here and what we have to do is actually turn
the head this way or the other way this would be our pivot point so for that i we actually need to consider
the head in slices like this so the
the bottom part of the slice would be the most affected by the controller bone, if we put the bone here
we will add another controller no it's not controller but it's a secondary bone that will move the opposite way we will have two bones and the main head bone which will be
controlling the head and these two bones so the closer is the slice to this point
the more it gets affected by controller this part should have
like zero weights by this bone and like 30 percent by this and this part is actually
would be our let me back switch back to the spine would be our cheek for example cheek
and a little bit side of the hair so we actually need to map this all face on the on
this head in our mind Let's start the rigging process Let's hide these bones first so they don't confuse us Ii just select them this way and left click
on one of their dots and they disappear There is another way to hide with the hierarchy
just select one bone and click with mouse right button on the dot it will hide everything and if some some bones
or images were hidden it will show them so it's like a toggle it's very helpful you have to try it have the nose separated here so i can move it
differently than the face let me fast forward this process and so you can see the last result this will be the bone for the back side it will be moving opposite to this bone so for that we just need
to select this bone and create a constraint and add the target to this, first we just click match
it fix the difference between these bones, after that we can just assign the value so if you are new to these constraints the higher
the value the more it listens to this bone, right now it will fully be controlled by this bone it's
it's not parented or it's not a child of this bone but rather than it's fully overrides it's values right now we don't want 100 percent
instead we want opposite, minus hundred percent, I love this feature it really
enables a lot of things in rigging, Now you can see that it's actually moving opposite
and you may imagine how this is the backside of the head and how it actually can work but again
it's not it won't give you the real 3d effect doesn't work that way, you will need to
separate this axis of these controllers what we do with this rig actually is just skewing
the head and not rotating in 3d This is the actual transformation that happens with
the head, and while in 3d you would assume rotation. I hope
in the next versions, spine will give us an opportunity to control constraints
x and y axis separately and maybe bind them together some with some kind of
rule so if for example x value of the bone is here and y value is depending on this
value right now these constraints are
not able to achieve this realistic head rotation what we get is just this skewing Let's continue by binding those meshes to
these three bones, the backside, the main head bone, which controls every everything in the
face and the actual controller. I will mark this bone as
a stop icon which indicates that we should not move this bone. it's secondary, it works on itself. What we need from this bone is actually to bind some vertices to this bone so they go the opposite
way. Okay let's start by binding them to this bone. First I bind all face meshes to main head bone. We are not going to bind mouth for now, I will just use constrain for mouth and eye bones later we will see if we need to
bind the mesh itself. let's continue. okay i think i'm done with the meshes let's
see what we can do with the eyes so previously i just put those bones inside this but it gave
me a flat turning so these bones and the nose itself were all on the same plane i don't want it
right now. So instead i will try to constrain them to controller Let's not go detailed in naming just give something so it can actually work again i hit
match, to store the difference, and as i said before the this character has a hat, this part
is a little bit further than nose let's see in photoshop and get back to this let me switch
to photoshop okay so right now what i would do if character is without head and has a naked head, i would just give 100 percent to the nose, to this slice But right now since we have
a hat and that comes a little bit further we need to give 100 percent
to this part and maybe some 80 or 75 to to the tip of the nose. I
actually count this starting from the center of the head. Right now you can see
this is the line that i divide by part so i can see that it's it's actually close to 75 and the eyes would be some 50 or 55 and so you
can see how much value you should give your parts of the face the vertices.
Let's get back to Spine so this part will have a hundred percent and
eyes will have some 75 We are going to create... well already created so yeah
we will give 75 percent to this They will be controlled by this controller. Let's also give this 75. Although sometimes i give give
them different values, because not always they are drawn in the same size in
same place you can notice that one eye is smaller than the other so to give it a nice look
sometimes I just give a little bit different numbers. Right now let's hit match, ah i've already done it and let's give the value. Next go to the mouth. Right now i'm going to just constrain the bone. and not touch the mouth mesh. Again hit match so the
difference is calculated, here you can see the number of difference and for mouth again i'm going
back to photoshop i think 60 would work okay So for eyes i should actually give
60 too. 75 would go for tip of the nose which i will do the next.
Outline of the nose as we gave this eyes a value of 60 to be
constrained to this bone it means that we are forced to give this edge of the nose not
less than 60. it's on the same plane on the same slice. Let me go back to photoshop
it's on the same slice so you can see here the eyes. oh the nose is actually a
little bit farther but not too deep. it only can get a little bit higher
values but not less than 60 percent. let's continue to bind the nose we just need
to select all the vertices and start by binding from the edge, because
whatever value has edged the higher value will have the tip so we are not risking to
then modify. So let's start by giving it like some 60 We know that the tip should be
75 from the slice that I've shown in photoshop let's give it 75 or maybe we can give it some 73
so we give space for this tip and it will be 75 and the further we go from the tip actually
it gets closer to this value which which is 60 percent let's give it slowly with fading out values We're finished the nose we will
get back to it in a moment, let's do the face. The face, the forehead, the cheeks should be considered as the
slices so the further it goes to the ear it should lose the value of the weight. You
need to consider that when we are close to the nose and eye and mouth actually let's select
those parts approximately i think it would be those vertices let's select those so we can
paint on them. I've just noticed that I haven't bound it to this bone, right now since I have selected, I will go and save this selection I pressed ctrl + 1 and it saved the selection. right now i need to bind this to this bone and get back our selection and
start to paint while selecting this bone. when this on this drop down you can find add
tool, i will just adjust these values of my brush and we
can even go and use this replace i think it's it actually limits, for example if we put 60 it
will limit your brush power to 60 percent, whatever you do here it won't go further than
60 percent it's very powerful, but i don't use much i just wanted to show you. Right
now let's start from 50 and paint the edges of
this selection and go a little bit higher and paint inside and maybe with much
higher value paint the tip part, maybe we can also paint the cheeks
with the higher values so they are a little bit closer to us then we will need to paint the other
parts, as i said the ears will actually not be weighted to this bone, further than this line nothing should be painted and weighted
to this bone this line is actually corresponds to the center of the
head and the closer to this line we lose the weights to both bones so the
the base of the ear is actually shouldn't be bound to any of those two
bones, let's bind this bone as well so we can have access to it and start to
actually paint on this side using this bone This hair part should not
be bound to this bone because it's very far from the center of the head to avoid some sliding effect that hat is actually
sitting on the forehead so it should not slide or float over the head, you
need to be careful so the value that it has here like some 46 percent. this
part also should have the exact same value to avoid the sliding, right now it has 52 and
definitely they will slide over when we move it I think we are ready
to start actually testing it let's do some quick fixes here We will have some issues
with the layering ordering of this mesh Let's leave it for now.
The head should also be bound to this backbone Let's create
brand new animation test and try to move it. If you are new to to spine and
you are wondering what means this orange lines and how to put them so while you are
making the mesh you have the option to create them yourself to like manually direct the
flow of the polygons for example if you don't like this polygon to be divided in to these
triangles you can just change it and make a custom. this also affects the smoothing pattern when you
smooth the values of the weights it actually flows through these orange lines like the values of to
this vertex will not be smoothed if this gets like hundred percent and this zero they will just flow
to this direction rather than to jump here. this eye definitely goes too far
let's reduce it's constraint value we are done here to not exaggerate the effect i would actually
avoid moving this head this way I could actually separate this part and maybe use them separately so this could
be totally controlled by the weights Let me check the final
time we have also some issues here right now i don't want to
make it perfect This character doesn't have any shadows it's
super easy so you need to consider if you are working with very polished art it will take much
time and if it's easy like the shape is clean it will take less time so you need to consider
all those aspects before starting, I think that's it if you have any questions let me
know i will think about what else i can share from my works.
See you next time bye!
