In this session, we reminded how to create blend shapes to animate the facial expressions and how to create a ‘rig’ or ‘skeleton’ to animated the head and the mouth of our model.
Using the ‘Shape Editor’ tool, we can create a blend shape or shape variation in order to set the facial expressions of our model. On each blend shape, we need to add ‘target’ points with which we could create our movements or reshapes, for example the eyes opening and closing, the mouth smile, or the eye brows frown.
In order to animate the head and the mouth opening, we created a ‘rig’ or ‘skeleton’ that will determine the joints of the neck and jaw. After setting the rig, we bound the skin of the model to our rig and painted the skin weights to add the influence parts of our model (the parts the will be more influence by the rig movement).
Lastly, we created the model’s set of teeth and added them to the rig influence.
I struggled a bit with the painting of the weights to open the mouth of the model. I had to adjust my mesh with the ‘soft brush’ and ‘relax’ tools so it started to respond appropriately.