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At first glance, you might think this expression just nails it out of the park.
Learn how to make your character poses more expressive by pushing facial expressions, connecting muscles, and adding subtle asymmetry.
Key Takeaways
- Pushing expressions beyond the initial pose enhances character appeal.
- Facial expressions require coordinated muscle movement for realism.
- Subtle asymmetry makes poses more dynamic and believable.
- Using rig controls effectively can create natural, fleshy facial expressions.
- Advanced rigs and pose libraries support detailed animation work.
Summary
- Expressions can always be pushed further to stand out more while maintaining appeal.
- Facial muscles must work together for realistic expressions, e.g., smiling affects cheeks, eyelids, and nostrils.
- Using Blender, the tutorial demonstrates how to create a chain reaction of facial movements for natural expressions.
- Asymmetry in facial poses adds interest and realism; one side can be compressed while the other expands subtly.
- Starting with a mirror tool helps in initial posing, but turning it off allows for asymmetrical adjustments.
- Specific controls like cheek controllers, eyelids, nostrils, and eyebrow compression are used to refine expressions.
- The tutorial shows how to push poses by compressing one side of the face and expanding the other, including nose direction adjustments.
- Tweakers in the rig allow detailed fine-tuning of eyes, mouth, and other facial features.
- Access to advanced rigs and pose libraries is available through TOAnimate for deeper learning.
- A free full lesson from the ultimate animation course is linked for further study on making characters feel alive.
Full Transcript — Download SRT & Markdown
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It's great, but watch as we push the pose even more.
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You'll see that there's always a notch higher you can go to really help the expression stand out.
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Let's take a look at how we can really push and exaggerate expressions.
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And at the same time, keep them appealing so that your characters don't look like they just got a fresh dose of Botox and can't move their muscles.
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Connect the muscles.
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All the facial muscles need to work together in order to form an expression.
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Right now in this Blender file, as you can see, we have the corners of the lips up, but it's not actually affecting the cheeks mass at all.
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If you do the expression yourself, if you try and smile and bring the corners of your mouth up, you'll notice that it not it not only affects your cheeks, but it also affects the rest of your upper face as well.
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It's impossible to smile without your cheeks contracting.
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And so if you want your character to feel nice and fleshy and connected.
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When they smile, you also have to think about the cheeks.
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So you can grab the cheek controllers and bring those up.
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Maybe these inner ones as well.
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And when you do that, this also affects the lower lid.
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So we're going to go ahead and grab the lower lid.
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Including these controllers right here.
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And since the eyes are closed, the lower lid will then affect the upper lid.
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So everything is connected.
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So we're going to go ahead and select the upper lid as well.
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And I'm going to bring everything up just a little bit.
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In this scenario, the nostrils will also be affected.
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So let's go ahead and grab the nostrils and bring those a little bit higher as well.
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And maybe a little bit outwards as well.
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Because the nostrils, again, if you smile, you'll notice that they're also connected to the cheek mass as well.
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So here's our before, here's our after, a slight difference.
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But in this new version, we've essentially created a chain reaction all throughout the face.
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Which happens every single time you sculpt any expression.
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So keep that in mind.
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Asymmetry.
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The other thing that would really make your expressions more interesting is asymmetry.
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This actually applies to the entire body, but let's just focus on the face right now.
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When I first start sculpting a pose, I usually start with this mirror tool on so that I can just grab a controller.
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Move it and have the other side follow.
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So I don't have to select two controllers and move them simultaneously.
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I can just select one.
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Have it automatically apply to the other side.
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But after a certain point, I turn this off and I push one side of the face to be different from the other.
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Usually, when you're making an expression, let's say I'm like this, you have one side be open and the other side more compressed.
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So you have one side open, one side compressed, and the pose becomes asymmetrical.
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And as you can see here, we go from our pose before to our pose after.
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One side's more open, one side's more compressed, and the pose becomes asymmetrical.
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This is a really good rule of thumb to help you know what to push in which direction.
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And keep in mind that asymmetry doesn't have to be super, super obvious where one face is squashed and the other face is really like expanded outwards.
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You don't want to be breaking the bones underneath the muscle.
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You want to keep it realistic and in a lot of cases, it can just be a slight subtle difference.
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So back to Blender here again, you can see in the more pushed expression.
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I decided to compress the right side of the face, this side right here.
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I compressed it towards the center of the face.
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And in doing so, I expanded this side more outwards.
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This is before, this is after.
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We have compression on this side towards the center of the face.
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And in doing so, I also compressed other things, for example, like this eye controller here.
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I compressed that more.
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Compressing it on one side, compressed here.
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Expanded outwards on the other side.
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Now, it's subtle, but it's noticeable.
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So let's make this pushed pose together.
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What makes something similar?
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I don't know if I'll get the exact same thing.
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But what you want to do is make sure the mirror tool is off.
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Grab the corner of the mouth and bring it up a little bit more.
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You can see that our rig also has a bit of fleshiness integrated already.
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So it already moves the cheeks and this area by itself.
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So it kind of, it's a little helping hand.
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But what we're going to do is push this up.
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And in doing so, remember we got to bring the cheeks up as well.
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Now, I'm going to grab the eye region controller and actually scale this in a little bit.
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So this squashes that entire area of of the left Max's left eye here.
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And if your rig allows for it, like ours does, we have an eyebrow compression.
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So I'm going to grab the eyebrow compression.
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Bring that down a little bit more.
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And we also have these green controllers on this side of the face, which controls the upper and lower half of the face rig.
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So what I'm going to do is grab the upper half of the face.
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And compress it towards the center.
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Grab the lower, compress that towards the center.
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So that we have one side going in and the other side going out.
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Now, we have the eyelids giving us a little bit of problem here.
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So let's try and fix that.
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Bring the upper lid higher and I'm going to bring the lower lid higher as well.
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Because we pushed the cheeks up.
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A little bit of fixing with the skins overlapping here.
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But that's not a problem.
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And then bring the eye region lower controller just a little bit higher because we pushed the cheeks up.
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And lastly, I'm going to grab the center controller on the nose and turn that slightly towards where the compression is happening.
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So that takes the entire nose and changes the direction of it.
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So we went from this pose to this pose.
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Where again, we're compressing on one side and expanding on the other side.
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And so we've done this quickly, but you can later go in and obviously use the tweakers to better make the eye line.
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And the other details on the face, which is really handy here with Max.
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Because he has tweakers literally everywhere.
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And if you want to get access to these really robust rigs that let you sculpt every area of the face exactly to your liking.
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You can join TOAnimate where you also learn about this and other topics in much more detail.
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You'll also have access to our pose library with lots of expressions.
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Hand poses and mouth shapes for lip sync.
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If you want to learn more about how to make your character's face feel connected and alive.
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Well, we've uploaded this lesson right here from our ultimate animation course.
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It's the full lesson and you can access it for free right here.
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So go watch that.
Topics:expressive posesfacial expressionscharacter animationBlender riggingasymmetry in animationpose exaggerationanimation tutorialfacial muscle connectioncharacter rig controlsTOAnimate
