Amanda Rabade

I spoke with Adam Burr again Sunday night just to touch bases and get some advice. It was really a brainstorming session to help me get through some mental roadblocks.

My biggest roadblock was actually setting up my facial rig. I’m still continuing to follow along with Jonah Reinhart’s blog, but I wasn’t able to successfully setup his second method, using set driven keys. I reached out to Jonah a few times but still couldn’t fully wrap my head around it, then I sent my file to my chair so he could help me and the problem seemed bigger than I had originally thought. After conversing with Adam, we came to the conclusion that I needed to abondon it. I can’t afford to keep putting time into something that I don’t fully understand. And we spent some time looking at other projects that used surface based facial rigging and realized everyone that has run into this problem has come up with their own unique solution. That scared me a bit. I had never done anything like this before, how was I going to come up with my own solution? But that’s where my topic comes back into play. I’m trying to combine a bunch of different techniques to make my rig possible. I don’t need to come up with a brand ner, never before seen setup, I just need to come up with something that works. Adam had made a good point; it’s not about the tech or how cool your rig is under the hood. It’s about getting the desired result in the most efficient way possible.

We were also able to brainstorm a bit on how to approach my particular character. Billy has a wide range of facial expressions and his different mouth poses would be really strenuous on a single piece of geometry. It would be best to rig different heads and have the animator switch between those. In addition to his wide range of facial expressions, Billy is mostly seen from a 3-quarter view, so I need to cater a lot of my solutions to fit his 3-quarter view.

All in all, my viewpoint needed to change. I was getting too caught up in the details and the tech of everything, that I wasn’t really thinking about how it was all going to work together, and that’s partially why my progress has been so slow. My upcoming goals include:

• Messing around with Billy’s geometry to see how it looks when it deforms
  • Use this to try and get the different mouth shapes on the expression sheet
• Try using MASH and see how that goes
• Try implementing James Johnson’s setup for the eyes
• Stop doing research, it’s time to rig