From the course: Blender 2.8 Character Creation

Testing the face controls

From the course: Blender 2.8 Character Creation

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Testing the face controls

- [Instructor] Now that we've done the work to separate the facial or the forehead controls and the brow controls from the bangs now we need to take a look at what is actually going to be controlling them. The same goes for the microphones. Remember how I said that the facial bones are parented to the head bone and the skin or the characters face is being influenced by the facial bones, but once we take that influence away, what's going to be controlling it? So, if I select this head bone right up here and I hit R two times to go to free rotate now if we rotate the head you can see that not only the bangs but the microphones are just staying where they are and that's because we removed all the influence of the face bones from them and therefore there's nothing else to influence them. So what we need to do is just make sure they're being influenced, make sure they have the proper weight from the head bone just like we did with the cap. So with this head bone selected I will tab into edit mode, I'm going to select all of the hair planes, here like this, and then I want to select the microphones as well and then what we can do is come over here and click assign at 100%, there we go, so now if we tab back into weight paint mode, select that head control up at the top if we rotate the head around now you can see that everything comes along. So now we have everything pretty much being influenced by what needs to be influencing, now lets go back to object mode and to pose mode for the rig and take a look at the controls again so, let me switch here to object mode and I'm going to select the rig now here in pose mode right here we can take a look at what the controls are actually doing. Let me turn off this layer here so we don't see the deformed bones and I'll also come over here at the lookdev display so we can see our textures on here. Now what we can do is we can actually come in and take a look at some of these controls so, say this control here if I hit G and move it around this is what I get . So we have to think is that what we want? Is that the kind of deformation that that particular control should be having. We can take a look at this one here lets say, and hit G and move that down and maybe we could grab this and move this down and so we can begin to kind of play with these controls and see if they actually doing what we want them to do. So maybe if I wanted her to be angry I could kind of, or like this and move these around like this, right? That kind of silly (laughs). So you can begin to play with the controls and see if its going to work the way you want it to work, or maybe I could take this control and bring it down like this, and maybe like this, so you could play with heavy eyelids or deforming here. This control here is the master eye control, you can hit G and move the whole eye around like that, Now when you want to go back to the default pose position, you can press control Z but sometimes you've gone so far that you don't know how far you need to go back. What you can do is select everything or select just one or two but I just like to select all the controls and then you can press alt+G to clear the transformation or the movements and you can press alt+R to clear the rotations and alt+S to clear the scale so I'll press alt+G and that will move everything back to the way it was. So if you rotate something lets see, maybe the head here I will select the head control up here and if I rotate this, so what I could do is press alt+R and bring that back. So alt+G and alt+R brings the character back to its default pose. All right so these are looking pretty good we can go through and do a few more here, we can look at the nostril and maybe the cheek here, and we can take a look at the jaw bone as well, so here's that jaw control. Do you remember when we used that joint between the temple and the jaw to kind of place where the jaw could hinge, back here near the ear? Well that's what this control does, if we go to the rotate tool here and click and drag that, rotates that down from that joint and opens the mouth. So there we go, we can begin to see inside of the mouth, I'm going to take this control and this control and I'm just going to scale them out, I'm just going to hit S and X scale them out a bit and then I can also just hit G and bring them down some, so we can kind of get to see the teeth inside the mouth here. We can also take a look at the tongue, so lets see if the tongue got bound properly to the correct bones. If we select this control here that's the tongue master so you can move that around and the whole tongue will follow, you can select anyone of these and hit G and move that around as well. So these are all the controls for the tongue. You can also grab these teeth controls here, and since we have parented them to bone, the head bone directly you can hit G and move these around wherever you want so if the teeth need to be up a little bit like this or whatever in your pose or animation you have the freedom to do that here with the way the rig is. Now you can also take this and you can hit R and rotate the chin back and forth like this if you want to create a chewing motion. So these are all looking pretty good, even the chin straps seems to be mold into the face pretty well. So what I'm going to do here is I'm going to hit A and select everything and then I'm going to press alt+G, alt+R and that will take us back to that default pose. So you can play around with some of these controls like this control here is the nose master you can hit G and kind of move that around and she can wiggle the nose, you've also got the ear controls in here, now they don't do a whole lot because we didn't really assign the proper weight to them to do much but, I wasn't planning on doing very much with these anyway, and the eyes of course are controlled by this control right here, and what's great about this particular rig is that not only do you have an eyes control here but the eyelids move slower, move along with the eyes at a little bit slower pace so the eyelids really look like they moving along with the eye muscles and that's a nice trick. To do that manually, to build all of this manually on your own, that's a lot of work so I like to have all this art in place for you. All right so I don't see anything hugely wrong with the face currently, I think I'm going to go ahead and go with that for now. What we do need to do is adjust this area down here because every time I select the head and move it you can see that this part comes along and this really should be a hard surface like a metallic ring on the suit and shouldn't be moving around as the character moves whether it be the head or the arms or anything. So, let me select everything here and alt+G, alt+R and, I think we need to work on removing weights and assigning the proper weight to this ring on the neck here.

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