Monday, August 7, 2017

beginner facial rigging project organization workflow

Hi,

I was working on a personal facial rigging project and wanted to share a project organization workflow I developed that I used for one personal project.

Basically it involved breaking up the project into smaller tasks.
The modeling tasks were broken down into smaller modeling tasks.
The rigging tasks were broken down into smaller rigging tasks.

Here are some screenshots of the folder structure I used:
Here you can see I broke the rigging into
- allRig
- joint
- blendshape
- rigUI

in blendshape i could focus just on modeling of blendshapes.  each version could work on adding a single new blendshape.

 in joint i could focus on just the joints and skinning.  For example one subtask was the jaw open.
 in rigUI i could have one folder for each facial ui system wanted to add.  For example the browRegular folder had the facial ui for controlling the brows.
 the allRig was where all the components were to put together.  So each version here had all the current blendshapes, joint systems, and facial ui's.

Below I show similarly how I treated separating modeling into smaller tasks.  Essentially separated into jaw, lips eyelids etc. (please note the topology here needs alot of work so i'm showing here more workflow than 'good' topology, also the character's appeal could use alot of work)


 here i have a rig toolkit section to experiment with different rig setup ideas.


Now i'm developing a more appeal/modeling workflow that centers on creating a single smile project for a very cartoony style dog face.  Hopefully from this can develop an appealing face with the smile shape and this can then be used as a start for the facial rigging project workflow shown above.

basically the project is smile and in this workflow basically each version tries to achieve a drawover design goal.  This is more artistic motivated and there is no topology involved yet.



Hope you find some of this helpful.

Happy Sketching!
Nate

Inspired by Jason Schleifer,
I first learned about rigging toolkits from reading his Animator Friendly Rigging.

Inspired by Todd Henry,
I first learned about project organization from reading his book 'The Accidental Creative'

Inspired by Michael Navarro,
I learned about importance of appeal in rigging

Inspired by Justin Leach
I learned about importance of appeal in rigging

Inspired by Ken Lee
I learned about importance of appeal in rigging