Facial Rigging Methods.
Which is best for you and your production.

I thought it was about time that I tackle this subject as I see the question a lot as I read questions on different forums and groups. The question usually comes in the form of “Which facial rigging method is best for…” insert your production of choice, and is almost always asked by some one new to the business and doesn’t really understand the scope of what they are asking. I figure it is about time that I address the larger question and give a complete answer as so many of the answers that I see are either inaccurate, incomplete or highly biased to the only solution some one has used them selves.

Lets get started.

“What facial rigging method should I use for my production”?

First off you shouldn’t be trying to define what the facial rig will be until you have defined exactly what your production needs are. Almost never do I see this question accompanied by a clear understanding of what will be required from the final results yet person after person, as well meaning as they are, gives them the answer. This is often the very first problem as the solution can not be defined if the problem that needs to be solved isn’t well defined.

Now the second problem in this question arises, the problem gets defined as “it’s a game” or “it needs to be really high quality”. Neither of these define anything at all and really only serve to muddy the waters even more.

So how do you define your needs?

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Lets say the project is a game, first what sort of game is it? Battlefield 5 just came out and damn it looks good. It can be described as high quality for sure. How ever facial animation isn’t at the forefront of that game, there is the odd time that you see a characters face give you a glance but for the most part they are unimportant to the over all game. For the cut scenes they need to have more abilities but generally not during game play. For a project like this speed is really what matters the most. With 64 online players and just about everything blowing up around you lag isn’t something the player wants to deal with.

So what if you are doing a first person high end PC boxing game where you are facing your opponent? With this sort of setup really strong facial work would be needed. That right cross to the chin needs to distort the entire face and even have beads of sweat flying off it. But does the character ever speak?

What about a children’s TV series? Even if the final renders are looking good the big question is how much time does the animation team have to work with the facial setup? If you over complicate the rig and add way to many controls the animator may find it difficult to hit dead lines. All the flexibility in a custom FACS based muscle system with a bone based dorito over driver and corrective targets will not help them at all. What they really need is a supper fast rig that allows them to hit the major phonemes and emotions with the least amount of work. Lets call it less is more in this case.

If what you are looking at is a full on 300 million feature film with realistic characters that are going full screen in an IMAX theater then the sky’s the limit. If you are that person you are probably not asking this question on some Facebook group looking for advise from students in their second year at a school no one has ever heard of. So if this is the sort of rig you think you need and you are reading this… think again, you don’t.

One of the first things that I do when I have been contacted by a client and asked to rig a character is I ask for the story boards and script. Once I have read and understood those then I ask to speak directly with the animation team that will be responsible for working with the rigs that I have created. One issue I have found is if I ask ten animators what they want I will usually get ten answers, some times I will get all ten answers in one. For this reason I usually only want to speak with a senior animator and work out with them what will really be needed. I have also had the answer “Well at Pixar we had this rig that…” and I have 2 days to build the entire rig for a TV commercial not a Pixar film. Sorting through this and coming to a good solution takes experience but without any of this information you are running blind.

What if you can define your needs?

So lets say you have done your home work and you have defined the needs for your production, what then? We need to know what the options are and what they can do for us if created properly. Properly is the key here, I have seen lots of riggers tell me that method X is no good at all but when I look at the system they built it is a complete mess, you need to understand, good facial rigs take time to create and to develop a work flow that allows you to create them quickly. Another thing that is very important is the ability to script tools to aid in the development of the rig as there are a lot of steps that can be automated to give you more time to finesse the rig.

What are the options?

There are a number of ways and combinations of ways to create a facial rig. Here is an incomplete list in order of complexity that some one will argue with me about either not including something or being in the wrong order.

Something to note is different software will call certain features different things. When I’m talking about Targets this is the same as Morph Targets in 3DS Max and Blend Shapes in Maya. C4D, Blender and others might refer to them differently as well.

Absolute Targets
Bone Based
Blended Targets
Hybrid Bone & Targets
FACS Muscle Based with a nice cream sauce and side of UI design.

Of course the above is by no means complete or factual but it is a good place to start the discussion.

Absolute Targets: (Morph Targets / Blend Shapes)

This is where most budding TA’s start learning the process of facial rigging. Absolute targets refers to creating a copy of your mesh and lets say modeling it into a smiling position and adding it as your Morph Target / Blend Shape, what ever you want to call it. This is fast and easy to do but it does have some major drawbacks for many productions. One of the biggest drawbacks is that every time you want your character to smile it will be the exact same smile, the second is that it will not allow the animator different ways of getting to the smile. The advantage is if all you need is the character to turn to the camera and smile once at the end of a commercial then this is a fast and simple way to get there. You could also use it in the case of those glances that happen in Battlefield as a player runs by you cowering in the corner and says “common, move up”! All you need in that case is a look and it would be easy to program that into the game to play the, get your ass moving, sequence and maybe randomly choose from a couple different looks.

Targets have a down side for games as they are slower than bone based systems but do allow for more fidelity in the shape of the face. That means it is easier to shape in finer details like winkles or other subtle changes in the face that would take far more bones than you might want. How ever you are stuck with a pose and don’t have many options as an animator unless you create many targets and even then each is an absolute shape.

Pros: Fidelity, ease of creation.
Cons: Slower then bones, not as flexible.

Bone Based

Bone based rigs are created with a series of bones where the face is then skinned to the bones and the bones via control objects or directly are animated to create the shapes that the animator needs. Bone rigs can take more time to create and f

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