Vern's Custom Facial Rigs Webinar

[shakurra]

Just finished with this tutorial...and, wow, it blew my mind! Vern, I am so grateful that you took the time to painstakingly walk us through this wonderful technique. For an AS newbie, it gives me much more options as well as stimulates more ideas for animation content. Thank you for sharing your work. -- Shakurra

[neeters_guy]

Just to make this useful to others who read this post, here's the link to the youtube video:
Anime Studio Webinar: Creating Custom Facial Rigs in Anime Studio

Here's the lostmarble thread:
FREE Webinar - Creating Custom Facial Rigs in Anime Studio

[heyvern]

Thanks for the feedback on the webinar. I really enjoy it and wish I could do more of them. They are actually a lot of fun. I do spend a lot of effort planning them and I am very happy people learn from them. That's why I do it. Makes all the effort worthwhile.

[shakurra]

Thanks, Vern for your Tumblr link. One question about your Custom Rigs Webinar, in specific with your Technician animation: can you go into more specifics on how you made the head turn? Thanks in advance. -- Shakurra

[heyvern]

Thanks, Vern for your Tumblr link. One question about your Custom Rigs Webinar, in specific with your Technician animation: can you go into more specifics on how you made the head turn? Thanks in advance. -- Shakurra

Ah yes, the technician head turn.

That rig is off the hook, over the top, incredibly complicated. It uses 300+ bones with constraints and a script to create a turn effect by translating a single bone left and right and up and down. It has complete total positioning of the mouth that also "turns" with the head. I still use it but it was created a while ago and needs to be updated with smart bones and nested bones to simplify it. It's incredibly flexible, very cool... but a crap load of work to accomplish. It has many bones exactly on top of each other to create the effect. Modifying the rig even for me, is difficult because of the complexity.

I gave that character to Smith Micro for inclusion with Anime Studio for people to use it as they wish and maybe get some inspiration, but replicating the effect with your own characters would be a bit difficult. It still takes me a bit of time to make new characters and I generally start with the existing rig and modify the vectors. Not easy. I am still very proud of the result and use it to create more characters by modifying the vectors rather than moving all the bones.

Lately I've switched to using two different options:

Smart bone turns
With a smart bone turn I recently created, it was much easier to "design" because it's all "hand drawn" and not "automated" with bones and scripting. Automation works but it doesn't cover everything and is a lot of work. My recent character in development has a full 360 turn front to back in both directions left to right. The up down turn is still proving a bit more difficult because of the "mixing" of the actions and the way that smart bones work. I've settled on using a more subtle up down motion.

Nested bone control makes this process much easier to achieve because the head can be a group layer and the shapes can change order for turning backwards. The other reason this is easier is that I am moving the points "exactly where I want them" on the smart bone turn positions. There is no laborious figuring out of bone constraint values to create the 3D effect. 2D is "drawn" and I've been trying to hand craft a "3D" solution.

Simple, fast switch turns
In my humble opinion, this is really the best way to do a head turn depending on your project. If you watch a lot of cartoons, head turns don't have an infinite number of possible angles. The turns are fast with 2 or maybe 3 positions. For the character you only really need a front, 3/4, side and back view for nearly anything else you want to do. My desire to have a full turning head is starting to get a bit silly and isn't needed.

If you do want some simple smooth slight turning of a character head, you could combine both techniques, shifting the points "by eye" to create a new position. Not a full position turn, like front to side, but a more subtle slight turn like 3/4 to front. that could be enough to allow more acting with a character with out a ton of rigging and drawing. Keeping it simple is a good thing and can save a lot of effort.

[shakurra]

Thanks so much, Vern, for your head turn advice. I'm really appreciative of your generosity in helping newbies like myself. Right now, I'm applying your custom facial rigs to my character -- using your webinar as my "bible" -- and so far am pleased with how it's coming out.