A Deformer-Based Approach to Facial Rigging

Facial rigging is the process of adding controls to a face for animating facial expressions. These controls are commonly bound to either deformers or blendshapes, both of which modify the face’s shape, scale, or orientation. Facial rigs created with complex deformers are intuitive, yet commonly slow and less tunable. Facial rigs created with blendshapes are fast, yet memory intensive and sensitive to model changes. This paper introduces a rapid, deformer-based approach to facial rigging using only skin clusters, (in-house) wire deformers, and pose space deformation (PSD).