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Muscle-Based Facial Animation

Instead of moving bones by hand, this script allow us to link bones to digital muscles and make them interact with each others.

For exemple, this is what happen when a single muscle is animated:

Here only the jaw bone is animated:

Here is a complex exemples with many muscles animated at once:


(Click here for a rendered exemple)

Now I'm an horrible animator, but the system does work. It was designed for in-game animations so only 17 bones are assigned in this rig. Its also very quick to set up, it took me 4 hours to rig, assign and animate the rendered exemple. I can't imagine working this quickly with morphs.

The best thing is that all the muscles work seamlessly togheter. Instead of creating 40+ morph-targets, we can create a dozen and mix them any way we like. This is great for the animators since they have less shapes to worry about, but at the same time they have more possibilities than ever.

This is the interface where you build and edit the system. It can be scary to look at, but a good setup will work for any head so you only have to use it once.

Finaly here is the actual animation interface:

Its a re-sizeable floating window with animated sliders. Left and righ asymmetry is acheived by using the horizontal sliders below each shape (which are also animated). The [x] button opens the animation curve for the appropriate shape.

The Global Controls tab has a few other features such as "Key all" and "Re-Organise Shapes" (which put them in alphabetical order).