As a part of my process for automating the rigging for my senior film, I also developed a script which would greatly increase the pace of creating a facial rig.
HOW IT WORKS:
Generates a Main locator which will be placed by the rigging artist in either the center of the eyeball, or the center of the mouth.
The rigging artist will then select a line of edges on either the eyelid, or on the lips. It CANNOT be an edge loop, but rather the edges the mark the start and end of either the top or the bottom lid/lip.
The script degenerates a locator at each vertex on the edge loop.
The locators will be used to build a linear curve with one CV per locator.
Each locator is connected to the spans on the curve.
The curve is duplicated and reduced into a curve with only 5 CVs.
The two curves are bound to each other with skin weights.
Two joints are generated per locator. The parent joint is located at the location of the Main locator. The children are then point and orient constrained to the locators along the selected edge.
Joints are placed on the CVs of the reduced curve, they find skin to that curve to drive it.
Controls are generated per those five joints.
Below is a video outlining the process.
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