Facial Motion and Controls - Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish - page 175

aaa eee

Figure 10.26 The mouth shapes for the Beast

ooo

Constructing Shape Controls

For ease of use during animation, the best controls for
your shapes are bones within the main control arma-
ture for your character. The controls can be visualized
as normal bones or represented as custom shapes to ease
the animation process even further. Figure 10.27 shows
all of the facial controls bones for the Beast. Eye, brow,
and nose controls are plain bones, while the mouth
controls arrayed above the head use custom bone
shapes. How you structure the controls of your charac-
ter is mostly a matter of personal preference, so we will
look at how the Beast's controls are set up to give you
some insight into the process.

Figure 10.27 Both plain and mesh-shaped bones can be
used for controllers