Lesson 4 - Face

The head is a very simple part of the model. There are no IKs to do and it's possible to not need any SDKs either.

Start by create a neck joint that extends from the spine to the top of the head.

Then add a jaw bone and parent it to the centre joint of the neck seen below:

It's as simple as that! You can start adding in extra bones and parenting them back to that centre joint for elements of the face like lips and eyes as seen here.

There are two methods to go about editing the face. The one shown above is joints however another method is Blend Shapes. These take an edited copy of the mesh and the original and 'blend' between the states. For example...

Here are 3 stages of blending between blinks. The first image is what the original models eyes were like. The second image is the edited mesh on the duplicated model. Finally, the third image shows a blend between these. It's possible to link the blend to a controller and move anywhere between the two stages of blends.

While this is an easier way of going about creating animation, it's also very computationally expensive.

As stated, the other way of animating the face is joints and controls. An easy way to do this is to constrain an simple circle curve controller to the joint it will control.

 You can see an example of it here. The joint on the chin is constrained to the Y axis of the controller infront of it. When I drag the controller on the Y, the jaw will move too.

This process requires the mesh to be skinned. We'll cover this in the next post.