Post 45 - Face Joints, manipulators and linking strategies

Now the eyes have been created, the next phase is to create the face structure. The concept is that joints are made in the same way as the eyes (created from the head base). The ends of these joints are positioned at various points of the face which manipulation is desired. Adding them as influence to the skinned geometry. Manipulators would then be parented to each joints so that they can be animated. I found THIS clip which gave me a good idea as to where the joints would need to be for face manipulation. The reason for having them joined to the head is so that the hierarchy is clean and the joints are parented to the head, so when the head moves, so do the joints as they are part of the head's hierarchy. However, one major issues I came up with was that when tying to work on adding NURB controllers / geometry etc, as there are 20-30 joints in the head, it was almost impossible to select what you wanted to. A simple solution to this would be to switch the joints to its own layer and selected the 'reference' mode, which makes them unalterable.


Then I found THIS  video clip by 'Polyfacecom', which shows the process of creating joints using joint nubs only. It demonstrates an eye brow being rigged in this way and helped me a lot in understanding what procedures would need to be adhered to. This was good, but I came across a big problem, which was that you need the joints to be influenced 100% to their manipulators, but you also need both the joints and the manipulators to be influenced 100% to the head so that when the head is animated, all involved would move 100%. 




Early tests would result in influence being shared, so manipulators would only have 50% influence and the joints would only move 50% when the head was moved (very messy and not a usable system). This is a problem which has resulted from using the joint nubs and by not having them jut out of the head (cleaner but has its' own implications and no longer parented sufficiently). The major work around that I came up with was as follows:


1) Parent a face joint (eye brow for example) to it's NURB 'disc' manipulator.
2) Parent the NURB disc manipulator to the head.


Although not directly parented to the head, this means that when the head is moved, the manipulators (parented 100%) would move with the head. As the face joints are parented to the manipulators 100%, these follow suit. This allows for the head to be moved and the joints to be controlled 100%. I am quite pleased with this work around as I came to this solution with no aid of tutorials or videos. The only issues I can think of for this method though is that the joints are not connected directly to the head, but as you need manipulators to animate the joints, as long as the manipulators are present, it would be fine. Plus if manipulators were no longer needed, it would be a simple case of either deleting the disused joint, or re-parenting it to the head. 


So to sum up, for a cleaner rig, you can either add the head joints onto a separate layer and hide / reference (in hindsight, probably a quicker solution), or do what I did and create face joints, then parent these to controllers, then parent controllers to the head which also works. In addition, head joints can at any point be parented back into the head if this system suits you better (select joints, then hit p to parent). So good flexibility available. 




Joint placement example - LINK
Joint and brow set up - LINK