“Facial Rigging for Stylized Character Animation” by Rik Schutte at Blender Conference 2025

At Blender studio, we’re developing a new Character Asset: Storm. This session will be a walkthrough on how I’ve explored different ways of facial rigging for a stylized character and why I chose to do it this particular way. The class will highlight the wants and needs from the animator and how this applies to the facial rig setup. We’ll go over the facial step by step by looking at the mouth, eyes, cheeks and eyebrows and explain the workflow and tooling for creating these setups. Each one of these has their unique approach and features provided for the animator in order to conviently work with it.