Facial Motion and Controls - Animating with Blender: How to Create Short Animations from Start to Finish - page 182

Here are a couple of fi nal tips for creating these kinds of controls:
● Make sure to parent these control bones to your main head bone so that they are always available when
looking at your character's face. Don't worry that the parented motion will activate the shapes. It won't.
These control drivers read the bone's local movement, relative to its parent.
● Consider locking bone transformations in the 3D View's Transform Properties panel for motions that
were not used in the controls. In other words, if your control bone only engages a shape along the X-axis
of motion, lock Y- and Z-axis motion as well as rotation on the panel.
● If you have two shapes for the same control zone that you would like to be able to blend, consider
attaching them to one control along different axes. For example, that way you can get 65% of one shape
and 50% of another by moving the control over 0.65 units and up 0.5 units.
● If you have more than two shapes for the same control zone, you will have to set up a “mixing board”
situation like the mouth and sound controls above the Beast's head.
● You can extend the Ipo curve line past the (0,0) and (1,1) points to get more than 100% or less than 0%
of a shape.
In Chapters 11 and 12 (animation and lip sync), we'll revisit the facial control tools with some practical advice
on how to actually use them.

NOTE
There is nothing to stop you from using direct armature manipulation of the mesh for facial
control. In fact, some animators and riggers fi nd it useful to move a character's jaw with a bone,
as opposed to shape keying. Entire facial rigs have been constructed using nothing but bones
and an Armature modifi er.

Rigging and Controlling Eyes

There are several ways to rig and control
eyes in Blender, but all of them involve
keeping the eyes as two distinct objects,
not part of the overall character mesh.

HEAD BONE

PARENT

Spherical Eyes

SIGHT
LINES

SIGHT
TARGET

For eyeballs that will be nearly spherical
and will not squash, stretch, or otherwise
deform oddly, the solution is bone-level
parenting. Figure 10.39 shows this method.

CENTER
OF EYE

● Position and rotate the eye to some-
thing that looks good as a rest posi-
tion. An actual camera-view render is
appropriate at this point because an Figure 10.39 How to rig eyes that follow a target