lonato rig

for the first time since second year, i had a proper bash at creating a facial interface- this one is much better than willie billiams, utilising more blendshapes and an interface that is representative of his head. I modelled about a quatre of the blendshapes myself, with Nate doing most of them while I finished the rig itself.

This rig is the first one I've succeeded in making fully scalable, and also has an IK/FK switch. It wasn't too much trouble to get any of this working, but overall I think the spine setup used for Jed is better as you can use both fk and ik controls at the same time- with a switch you cannot. Suprisingly though I was unexpectedly held up by weighting issues on account of the seperate head geometery coming apart at the seems. It took me a long time to work out an acceptable solution, which essentially involved going into the component editor and matching up the exact weight values for each vertex individually.
Unfortunatly it still doesn't look as good as it should- to avoid this in future the whole combined mesh should probably be used for the blendshape models, as I only found out recently you can delete all the blendshapes once linked up and it will still work fine.