Gear_mc and FaceRobot Facerig components - some advices

Issues concerning rigging & Face Robot...
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Nick3d
Posts: 71
Joined: 10 Aug 2011, 14:16

Gear_mc and FaceRobot Facerig components - some advices

Post by Nick3d » 08 Jan 2014, 09:35

Hi guys,
So I'm building both facial rigs using FaceRobot and Gear_mc and I would like to ask you some things regarding some features on both of them

Gear_mc:

I've built the eyes, mouth and eyebrow controllers and they work pretty good, now I need to build the eye directionality controller ( eyes look at ), the nose controllers and hopefully something that resemble the FaceRobot wrinkle tool, something like http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bJnvUZ0U88 @2.40 or if the envelope weights could easily solve the "mouth/forhead/aread below the forhead wrinkles problem" that allows the skin to compress and stretch which works very good in FR

Since is the first time that I'm building a facial rig with Gear I would like to know what is the best approach to build my missing controllers, if there are guides within Gear itself suited for the nose and eye directionality...could be a dumb question, but I would like to avoid spending 2 days finding out the best solution for an eye directionality controller when there is already something buit-in inside Gear ;)

Also since I have multiple humanoid characters I'll save the eyes/mouth/eyebrow and eventually eye directionality and nose guides as a model, in order to re-use the guides for another character without building everything from scratch again, but I was wondering if is possible to let Gear ( or "just" a python script ) build the entire guides all at once ( with all the parenting and setup )

Facerobot:
I suppose because of the soft tissue every time I try to export the FR rig to a game engine the weights are completely f*cked up, and usually I can see both the FR head mesh and the mesh that FR generates with the soft tissue feature, which I'm not able to find where is it in the explorer
I already solve that issue using the game export function, it works very nice and do not cause problems, but every time I have to re-merge the head with the body, adjust the envelope weights again on the neck, and then export the entire character, which is fine for a 30second animation, but if you have 300 facial mocap ane everytime you have to do the same re-merge/envelope adjustment it becomes really frustrating
Except the FR point cache option ( the video is on vimeo ) is there a way to succesfully simplify the FR rig, be able to merge the FR head with the body and do not screw the facerig created with FR?

I'm leaning towards Gear for my facial rigs, but I would like to know if FaceRobot could be the quick and dirty solution to my needs

Cheers and sorry for the very long explanation :)

SpookyMunky
Posts: 102
Joined: 14 Jun 2012, 02:30

Re: Gear_mc and FaceRobot Facerig components - some advices

Post by SpookyMunky » 17 Jan 2014, 09:38

hmm, not going to pretend I understand most of your post :)... eye controller just make it, will be the same as gear....... you are probably past this point by now though :).. to recreate the wrinkles in a game engine couldn't you just say map regional rinkle lines to bones and expand / contract / move them linked with the positional movements of the face bones ?. In my mind it should equate to the same thing.. if extra bones aren't an option then maybe add in shapes for each wrinkle formation ?, again linked to mouth shapes...

For the exporting issue, hmm.. maybe it'd be best to create a duplicate rig in xsi that is driven by the face robot rig ?, that way you would only ever be exporting what actually works and hopefully negate the whole merging 300 meshes etc hehe. In my mind it should be relatively easy to create a shadow version of FR.. really isn't my area of expertise though, sorry :)

Edit: by regionalise I mean basically just split your FR wrinkle map up into small areas, in my mind even if you did get face robot working perfectly it'd still be too cpu heavy for a game using a single map, split it up into regional shapes / weighted to say 6 bones ? (or 6-10 diff shapes)... could be very cool :)

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