Major: Facial Rigging (Part 5)

Yesterday, I finished 2D facial rigging all of my characters. I started out by replacing all of the test textures where I had been feeling out the facial features for each character with their blank base texture, and then went to work exporting everything into their respective folders. 

I started to then take these into Maya, starting with Kit. After I had figured things out, I moved on to the rest of the characters.

I did encounter some issues, but most were easily solvable. The most prominent one was that if I had too many nodes attached to the layer texture node, my character's faces would render out as a flat black texture. Unfortunately, this did mean that I had to cut down on the amount of things I could do with the facial rig, as I had to have the eyebrows move together instead of being able to have a slightly more flexible rig where they could move individually. I also had to sacrifice the alternate pupil sizes for the characters that required them because of this issue as well, but I didn't mind so much as I can still work around this by either dropping them entirely, or by saving out different versions of the same model with the pupil texture replaced in the rig if the changes are really necessary.

Another smaller problem that I take (that isn't really an issue in and of itself, moreso related to preference) is that Kit's facial rig control is slightly too small. When I moved on to the other characters, I made the control slightly bigger than Kit's and I realised that I preferred this slightly more. However, I don't want to waste time making smaller tweaks for things that are ultimately harmless, so I'm going to leave it alone.  

Otherwise, my character rigs are now complete and I want to focus on lighting my scenes and characters so I can move onto animating some bits and pieces of my animatic if possible. If I do end up with some time, I would like to revisit the buttons and reskin those in a different way, but they don't seem to be causing any issues with movement as my characters don't move in any particularly extreme manners for them to look like they're detaching from the geometry.