Are you ready to learn facial rigging? This advanced video course gives you the tools and knowledge you need to create functional, intuitive and appealing facial rigs for your characters.

10 chapters. 54 videos. 7 hours of content.

This training is created by Rik Schutte, lead animator at Blender Studio. Alongside his work on Blender Open Movies, Rik’s credits include Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018), Smallfoot (2018) and Anomaly (2011).

What is Advanced Facial Rigging about?

This is a step-by-step guide to building a high-quality facial rig in Blender. You’ll combine several facial deformation techniques with Blender’s native tools and free add-ons that support this workflow. Along with 54 videos, the course includes project files, scripts and add-ons, so you have everything you need to follow along.

Facial rigging can be daunting and tedious. This course offers a straightforward, standardized process that can serve as a foundation for many characters and styles.

This course is not about rig automation: almost everything is built from scratch. To fully understand the workflow, it’s important to go through every step and understand the concepts behind it.

Advanced training

This training assumes you can navigate Blender comfortably and are familiar with constraints, bone assignments, and rigging in general.

If you are familiar with rigging and want to expand your knowledge of facial rigging, this course is right up your alley. Even if you are an animator who wants to peek under the hood, this course offers an interesting look at the decisions made to accommodate certain features for animators.

References

The workflows and techniques in this course are inspired by facial rigs common in the animation industry. The goal was a facial rigging workflow that lets animators create dynamic, appealing animation with characters capable of a wide range of expression. Rik’s knowledge comes from years of animating with high-end, film-quality character rigs and from taking facial rigging courses.

While creating the Advanced Facial Rigging course, Rik also consulted riggers and animators across the industry to learn the principles they follow when building and using effective facial rigs. Many of the facial rigging principles and deformation concepts used here are explained thoroughly in Brian Tindall’s book The Art of Moving Points.

Ribbon Guides and Shape Keys

One method covered in the course is the ribbon guide mesh. It gives smooth, predictable interpolation between neighboring bones while following the “three-curve principle” described in the book.

Another method uses a series of shape keys to handle brow and cheek deformation. It applies the same three-curve principle in a more traditional way.

Both workflows are universally applicable and conceptually equally strong, and the course covers each in detail.