Osipa Rigs

As part of our Modeling and and Rigging sessions we were shown Face Rigs, something we haven't looked at before. This involved blend shapes and Osipa rig controls.

I liked creating the blend shapes with mudbox, it felt like a good way to work. We started from a neutral model and sculpted it into a happy expression. Then by weight painting the blend shape we  out the different parts of that expression, for example moving each eyebrow up individually, or moving one side of the mouth without the other. I liked the mudbox workflow, pushing the geometry round was simple and effective.

The hard part however, was creating the floating controls to animate the blend shapes. Although there are scripts out there that automate this, which I do hope to look into, it is always good to know what is happening underneath. And it was quite a complicated thing to get our heads around.

This is all done in the node editor, something I'm getting more used to using. We used a locator as the controller, and this had be connected to the blend shapes on the object.
Even though we started on just a cube with 4 blend shapes, getting the math right and using condition and multiply nodes correctly, was quite tricky, and it was easy for a small error to make the whole thing behave differently from what you wanted.
With a few days of experimenting I have gotten more of a grasp on it, and managed to create what is in the GIF above.

Starting over from scratch and rebuilding the nodes has really helped my understanding. 
You can move the cube left and right to go between each extreme, and up and down lets you blend between them. A good starting point, but definitely something I would like to work on more.

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