This tutorials covers how to create a more advanced type of facial rig, showing you how to use the “stretch to” constraint to give the face a more fluid way of animating. The “stretch to” is great for things like lips and eyelids (which is shown in this tutorial); in addition, I show you how to make the eyelids “stick” to the eyeball surface, so there’s no unwanted gap between the two while animating.

This tutorial covers the entire animation process of this little guy, first, creating a simple fk armature or rig, then assigning the mesh vertices to each bone using the weight painting technique, and last, animating it using non linear animation tools.

Here I will attempt to explain my recent dealings with using Blender Shape Keys to produce convincing lip-sync (Lip-synchronisation, ie: “speech”) for simple, humanoid characters.

This is aimed at people with an understanding of Blender fundamentals like vertex loops, face loops, sequencer and of course, Blender’s new Shape Key system. If these terms mean nothing to you, then you may well struggle to keep up. If you’re familiar with them then I hope this tutorial will prove to be a breeze and your characters will be speaking so fluently you’ll have trouble shutting them up!