Create a Facial Animation Setup in Blender

In this two part tutorial, you will learn how to create a basic facial animation setup for a character in Blender. The first part covers the introduction of Shape Keys and how to create basic expressions commonly used for animation. In the second part, we'll look at how to add drivers using bones and controllers.

Additional Files:

Download the Project Files for Part 1.

Introduction

Basic Expressions

There are six expressions for six basic emotions - anger, happy, surprise, sad, fear and disgust. To draw or illustrate these emotions, we use the eyebrows, eyelids, and mouth. Just by changing these lines we will get very different expressions. We must also understand how these parts move and their limitations. Many other emotions such as bored, shock, devious, confused, contempt, etc. can also be achieved through various permutation and combinations of the eyebrow line, lips, and eyes.

Shape Keys

Shape keys are used where we need to animate the shape of an object by animating the vertices of the mesh, which are difficult to deform with bones. These are also know as morph targets or blend shapes.

Preparing the Mesh

Step 1

Make sure to apply the Mirror modifier before creating shape keys.

While editing the mesh, we must also take care that the eyeballs are not edited, if it's not a requirement. So it's good to make them a separate object. Select any vertex of the eye by Right Clicking and then press Control-L to select the connecting mesh (the eye sphere). Now press P to make them a separate object.

Step 2

Some shape keys apply to the whole face. But for some keys, we need to make individual shape keys for the left and right, e.g. one shape key for the raised left eyebrow and another for the raised right eyebrow. Now instead of creating one at time, we can create a shape key together and later split it into two different keys, one for the left and one for the right. This can be done by creating vertex groups and later we can assign a shape key to affect only a particular vertex group, say left or right.

In Edit mode, press B to enable drag select and select all the left side vertices. In the Mesh Data properties, under the Vertex Groups panel, press the + (plus) sign to add a Group.

Name the vertex group Left and click Assign. Make sure the Weight value is set to 1.00

Step 3

Similarly, select all the right side vertices and create a new Group.

Name it Right and with the Weight set to 1.00, press Assign to assign the selected vertices to the group.

Step 4

Press A to deselect all vertices. Now only select the middle row of vertices. Alt-Right Click to select a row, or Shift-Right Click to manually select multiple vertices.

Select Left in the Vertex Group panel and reduce the Weight value to 0.5, and then press Assign.

Similarly, assign the middle row to the Right vertex group with a 0.500 Weight value. Click on Right in the Vertex Group panel, reduce the weight to 0.500 and then click Assign. By doing this, we have assigned the middle row to both the Left and Right groups.