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About the Author

Avatar image for Bart Veldhuizen
Bart Veldhuizen

I have a LONG history with Blender - I wrote some of the earliest Blender tutorials, worked for Not a Number and helped run the crowdfunding campaign that open sourced Blender (the first one on the internet!). I founded BlenderNation in 2006 and have been editing it every single day since then ;-) I also run the Blender Artists forum and I'm Head of Community at Sketchfab.

34 Comments

  1. Dont want to start some bashing but final effect looks like half decent robot... As long as somebody is happy with this result is ok I guess. I am not.

  2. This addon helps you rigify your models, not animate them. The poor result is cause of lack in animating, not in rigging.

  3. Wait wait... where did "the rigify button" pop from? I must have missed a step :D

    Otherwise, I think what the rigger wanted to show was how flexible its rig could be.

    I think with some fine tuning it could complete the autorig thingy...

    (sometimes I wish there was something close to Character Studio in 3DSMax...)

  4. Nice, but so many bones !

    I have always been afraid and surprised by the number of bones used for rigging a character. I have done few characters so far, and I don't think I'm good at rigging them (mainly problems with weight painting for elbows and shoulders joints !), but I always search minimalist setups. For facial animation, good results canbe achieved with around 15 bones only, and it is very easy to animate !

    Really, I think that so complex armatures are scary for beginners !o)

  5. Incredibly well done! But the rig doesn't always produce natural looking facial expressions. In fact, it sometimes looks hilarious.

    Anyway, keep up the excellent work!

  6. Awesome!
    When I see something like this I wonder if one day I will reach that ability.
    I hardly can model, rigging is far from my capacity, not speaking about animation.
    Well done Khuuyj, you deserve all my admiration.
    Regards,
    Davide

  7. the script is actually really great, but it needs tweaking! perhaps u can open a thread at blender artists script forum for some testing and feedback! i think that many of phonemes must be tweaked manually and theres another guy that makes a script for phonemes that makes a script for synchronizing phonemes automatically from files imported from papagayo, i think!Both of you can collaborate to make the best face autorig system with some help and feedback from community if you want! just giving some ideas! ha-ha! the new blender is becoming so awesome program with thanks to developpers and the community! i want to thank you - all of you! Blender forever!

  8. Very cool add-on!

    Though it's more for very advanced animators. Twitcher don't knows the theme - it's obviously.
    I see that face is moving very realistic and the weighting is almost ideal! Am I right that this add-on does all this hard work with weight painting? If it's so - then REALLY BIG RESPECT Khuuyj! And big thanks! :) Someday I will be using it for sure.
    I just imagined how all this will be looking with full spectre of face's motions and body poses - this must be really awesome!

    Can somebody tell me - what is that "Most of skinning is Auto Deform"?

  9. David Lindsley on

    Very, very well done! A lot of time and work went into this. I could have used this exact rig a few months ago when I was contemplating using mocap for face animation. But the more I looked into it, and the many examples on the web, the more I realized that it really misses the mark a lot. Sadly, this is painfully obvious in the last few seconds of the video where the finished render lip-sync is just, uh, so-so.

    I too created a bone face rig that worked somewhat okay - but then I scrapped it when I ran across this video:

    http://www.mon-ami-charly.com/gallery/facial-rig.html

    Wow! So I went back to my shape keys and created an armature and control panel very similar to this video. I now have tons of control - almost too much. I only use a few of the sliders and controls - but they are there if I need them.

  10. Clearly a lot of work has gone into this - but why don't the results look anywhere near as good as those seen in "Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within" dating from 10 years ago?

  11. Oh, come on, people. Think a bit professional.

    This video is supposed to show the abilities fo that rig, not how good the guy is as an animator.

    And no, there is and there will be no "Make awesome art" button in near future, not even in Blender. The finetuning won't go away just because the setup is done quicker. So please spare your "why doesn't it look like Final Fantasy". Why doesn't it? BECAUSE THERE WERE SOME OF THE BEST ANIMATORS SITTING BEHIND THAT MOVIE! Making something look natural is the hardest part in animation, so as long as you didn't create some awesome animation yourself, please stop to complain.

    From my point of view this is a great addition to Blender. And going from zero Rig to a full character face animation in that time is amazing.

  12. @clawjelly

    Solid answer! +1
    There is nothing to say more "oh, no!" after your arguments.

    Please, anybody, tell me... what is that “Most of skinning is Auto Deform” comment in video means?
    Is it a common thing for a rigger? Just say that and I'll found it by myself.

  13. I suppose it means that he uses the skin values that blender assigns by itself. With other words, he just doesn't touch them up. Which is a good sign for the rig! ;)

  14. Very nice rigging setup!

    I like the possibilities of typing text and having it animated. The VSQ format, as far as I can tell, is proprietary to Vocaloid (Yamaha). It may be that the format cannot be used for commercial purposes (or any purpose) without a license agreement.

    However, there are other solutions. Adobe products support converting audio into speech, which includes the possibility to export text with key points in XML format (I think). There are also a large number of other timed text formats out there . . . if VSQ has been translated, I would *really* (*REALLY*) like to see some other formats converted.

    I am only mentioning this, though, because the rigging opens up these conversations. Great job, and thank you!

  15. COOOOL!!!! this addon is amazing ^^ shure took some time to create.
    i guess there is only one thing, wich would take it to the next level ^^ adding mumbling, that lipsync allwas looks like it is at 100% of the pose, in normal cases noone would allways do the exact same pose at 100% muskle usage... anyway once its finished it´l take the animators work XD
    simply amazing, thanks for the hard work

  16. This was very good insight into to difficulties and complexity of facial animation, very impressive for one artist. From an entertainment standpoint however, i found it very lacking. The face seems blurry, the lips seem to be in sync with the music in a strange way.The fact that it's in a foreign language however, would likely put an english speaker like myself at a disadvantage in trying to improve upon it. It would be great if i had the ability to improve upon it, but as far as Blender and 3D art, I'm still a super novice.:-)

  17. @ROUBAL
    For the face rig if you turn on only the bottom left bone layer (about 1:23 in the video) those are the controller bones. Simple very fast, easy and effective :D I agree with Peter it needs just a bit more tweaking but overall very awesome

  18. AllNamesAreRegistered on

    Haha the Megurine Luka song fails to mitigate the robotic feel.
    Good rig but like it's been said, you shouldn't solely rely on the preset animations.

  19. I love this Rig! Forget about how bad the Sample animation is. If you animate the rig yourself and emphasize the expressions in your own keyframing you will see intense emotion created from bone movements.

    Please Please Please, what I would like to do is make the Papagayo import plugin control this Rig instead of controlling shape keys.

    Is there anyway I can modify the Papagayo importer "io_import_lipSync_Importer.py" Plugin to control the ActionKeys instead of Shape Keys so this rig will be controlled by its Actions?

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