I’ve just finished a nifty tool which allows me to transfer a Blend Shape Facial Rig from one character to the other by using an adaptive mask which recognize facial features and transfer the blend shapes to a target face.
This solution saves many many hours of manual Blend Shape creation and allows for a very quick sharing of the facial rig across multiple ( humanoid ) characters.
The Blend Shape rig is based on Faceware expression sets since that is the software I’m using for facial animation.
The system is heavily inspired by the GDC2011 by good old Jeremy Ernst from Epic.
I actually asked him if he could share his system to the community, but because of the change of ownership of GOW the sharing could cause legal issue…but the pdf paper ( and the conference video ) is still available, so it’s just a matter of spending 2-3 hours in Maya ( or any other software to be honest ).
Main difference is that he’s driving a joint-based facial rig, while in my case the mask itself carry all the expressions and applies them to a character with a custom operator.
I’m evolving a bit the system by using directly a high poly cage/mask without the LODs iteration, but I’m having some issues with the inner eye sockets and the inner mouth, so I think that I’ll just remove them.
During this week I’ll do another video and, as soon as my mocap suit will arrive, I’ll create a sweet demo to show you all
I thought another workaround in Maya which should work without any custom operator but with native deformers, so in case I think I just might do a tutorial about that
I know for my part I don’t have the proper Maya skills to recreate this by any means. Looks soooo useful too!