I’ve been working on a survival horror game in my free time, but during the month of October, I wanted to switch gears and try to make a cartoony face rig. I first watched Josh Sobel’s Expressive Facial Rigging, and then worked out how I could apply some of those concepts in a more game engine friendly manner. (Hint: it’s just lots of joints and corrective shapes). Unfortunately, aside from using Alembic exports, the whole global/local rig concepts in the tutorials isn’t really applicable to game engine workflows.
I’m probably about 50% happy with the end result. There is a lot more I’d like to have done, but I set myself a time limit as to not spend forever on it, so maybe the next one will go a bit faster.
The rig is mostly joint-driven with about 20 corrective blend shapes. I also threw some quick dynamics on the hair and hat in UE4, but they’re not very polished.
Here it is rendered in UE4:
And here it is in Maya: