Grae s Facial Animation

Grae's Facial Animation

Now that we have some experience working with the two main styles of facial animation, it's time to take a brief look at Grae.

Whichever animation method you choose, rigging Grae's face will be simpler than doing Kila's, mainly because he does not speak. Nevertheless, his jaw will need some slight movement, as will his upper lips. So we'll do some rigging for these, in addition to his eyes and eyebrows.

When it comes to rigging the joint-based face, you can skip most of the attributes we included for Kila. Just use JawOpen to control how the mouth opens, and add JawSlide to enable the jaw to move left and right as he grinds his teeth. Add some poses for his tongue, too; you should be able to see it moving because his mouth can open quite wide.

For the lips, create a LeftUpperLip and RightUpperLip attribute, and connect them to the upper lip joints. These will enable the animator to make him snarl.

In addition, you can copy Kila's final six attributes: LeftInnerBrow, LeftOuterBrow, RightInnerBrow, RightOuterBrow, LeftEyeLids, and RightEyeLids.

For Grae's blend-shape animation version, stick to more or less the same face shapes as Kila's, which can be seen in Figure 13.41.

Figure 13.41. Grae's blend shapes