Hello I want to learn facial rigging!!!
Does anyone know anything about facial rigging tutorials?
Like blend shapes, bones or muscles?

Moin,

depending on your needs, either one or all of the approaches you mention may work or are actually required. There are hundres of tutorials on facial rigging out there, the fundamental ideas all apply and you just need to convert the technical aspects to Houdini.
Brian Tindall's “The Art of Moving Points” is said to be outstanding good for understanding basic facial rigging methods. I don't have it, because I don't use Apple devices (if not getting paid to do so), but I haven't yet heard any negative critic on his book, yet a good amount of praises.

Marc

Hi Marc! Thank you very much!
I looked it up and it seems it is available for iBooks! And it includes videos as well! Seems nice!

But I looked at the sample and thought maybe I prefer video tutorials. It is easier for me to understand…

Are there any video tutorials that are very helpful that you know of?

hundreds. :-D

Google should help you finding lots of them - like I said above: Which methods work for you really depends on what your needs are. I think that, the more “realistic” you want to get, the more you need to combine everything possible. If you are going for stylized expressions only, a bone-setup and captured (hand painted) geometry should work nicely. The more “realistic” touch you want, the more you may have to spill in some corrective morphs - until you finally land at scripting each modifier/transformer yourself.

If you want to start at the realistic shore, also take some anatomy into consideration. The better you understand the bone structure underneath the skin, muscle and fat, the better you can organize your rig.

I doubt that there is a single “do it this way and you get paid” tutorial.

Marc

Haha
Thank you!

yes, it very much depends on what you're trying to achieve.
drop down a simplemale or simplefemale from the Characters shelf, RMB and Allow Editing of Contents
you can poke around and see how these characters have been rigged - they use bones and blendshapes.

if you have an audio maybe saying: i know is true. you have four poses. 1 for i 1 know etc. And blendshape and edit sop make a good job for something like that. this of course is very vougue but if you have an audio you have a time to blend de poses.
but if you want make a facial rig asset for other, well i have no idea. maybe a web of bones! .

Just to nitpick:

> i know is true

… has at least 10 poses, including jaw, lips and tongue. “I” has at least two, “know” at least three, “is” two and “true” three or four minimum. :-)

Marc

put a bushy beard on your characters…problem solved!

hehe … ONE POSE to rule them all!

arctor
yes, it very much depends on what you're trying to achieve.
drop down a simplemale or simplefemale from the Characters shelf, RMB and Allow Editing of Contents
you can poke around and see how these characters have been rigged - they use bones and blendshapes.

Thanks arctor! I will check that out!!!

chevita.
if you have an audio maybe saying: i know is true. you have four poses. 1 for i 1 know etc. And blendshape and edit sop make a good job for something like that. this of course is very vougue but if you have an audio you have a time to blend de poses.
but if you want make a facial rig asset for other, well i have no idea. maybe a web of bones! .

Hello chevita. Audio? Sorry I couldn't quite understand.. What do you mean by that?
I am thinking of rigging, animating and rendering using Houdini by the way


Aaaah! Nausicaa!! My favorite movie!!

haha. But you want to make a facial rig for a moving face of character. So if you do not know how make a facial rig with bones, you can make a facial rig with edit sop and blend shape. i mean, if you have an audio file you can count not to bad like if i would count the fonemas for “ if you like i would kiss you” the poses of the character not only depende of counting but of tecnique. you can learn chees fast but play good need time

malbrecht
Just to nitpick:

> i know is true

… has at least 10 poses, including jaw, lips and tongue. “I” has at least two, “know” at least three, “is” two and “true” three or four minimum. :-)

Marc

maybe i need to lear how count in that way!

chevita.
haha. But you want to make a facial rig for a moving face of character. So if you do not know how make a facial rig with bones, you can make a facial rig with edit sop and blend shape. i mean, if you have an audio file you can count not to bad like if i would count the fonemas for “ if you like i would kiss you” the poses of the character not only depende of counting but of tecnique. you can learn chees fast but play good need time

Yes! I was thinking about doing that! but the problem is my character mesh has too many points since it was subdivided in the export…

So right now I am trying to make the faces in Blender(which is the modeling software I use) before the subdivision and then import them as blend shapes to Houdini.

But some of the blend shapes don't work correctly…

I would still love to learn about facial rigging though!(Like muscles) But I can't seem to find any tutorials for Houdini about that…

what crappy and mad mesh
you need to use this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0yssikB4l2s [youtube.com]
but keep going and you be like pixar

Wow! This is such a useful video tutorial!!! Thank you very much!!!

ALMINA
So right now I am trying to make the faces in Blender(which is the modeling software I use) before the subdivision and then import them as blend shapes to Houdini.

But some of the blend shapes don't work correctly…

it looks like you have different point counts on your mesh and the blend shapes.
use the lattice SOP set to Points mode to drive the main mesh's points into the shape, then use sopcreateedit to make the blendshapes into Edits:
http://www.sidefx.com/docs/houdini15.5/commands/sopcreateedit [sidefx.com]

Thank you arctor! But is TopoBuild which chevita introduced a video tutorial of, also an option???

Yes, it seems like the opened mouth model had 8 points less than the others.
Is there a fast way to fix the point numbers?

Thank you arctor! I'll try that! and where am I supposed to type in the sopcreateedit command?

Edit: I seem to have trouble using the lattice tool… There are too many points to move. I like using the edit tool with the soft settings on but then it seems to move the teeth as well, which I don't want

read through this thread (wow…from 2009)
http://forums.odforce.net/topic/9136-importing-external-blendshapes/ [forums.odforce.net]

I uploaded a simple setup file there that can get you sorted.
be sure the read the comments on the nodes in that file using the middle mouse button.

might be worth making as HDA to do this…when I have some time