Character Face Rigging | Roll to the Beat DevLog 6

In the sixth devlog of my animated short film Roll to the Beat, I tested the range of motion and poses I can get from my characters' rigs. That included the iconic Michael Jackson anti-gravity lean, which turned into a few test renders of the beetle flying.

Things went smoothly until I copied the beetle's skeleton over to the ladybug and saw that my facial bones weren't set up well. I spent a whole day trying to get the mouth to deform correctly. The answer was control bones. Normal bones follow a parent, but control bones move other bones through constraints.

I rebuilt the ladybug's skeleton from scratch, using one of the Rigify add-on's default rigs to learn how facial bones are set up: cheeks, neck, nose and eyebrows. Next, I'll bring what I learned about the mouth back to the beetle, and my goal is to finish the roly-poly by the end of next week.

Watch the sixth devlog of my short film Roll to the Beat on YouTube.