Cartoon Character Binding: this brings some challenges, the most difficult is the facial binding, cartoon character expression changes need to be made with blendshape, I use faciel finished character facial binding. Then used auto rig pro to do the body rigging and finally merged the two controllers together.
Face rigging
Body rigging
Body Rig：
auto rig pro to do the body rigging：Body binding in blender is similar to the process in maya. First build the skeleton and put the joints in the right places, head, chin, neck, wrists, ankles, and the end of the spine.
Building the skeleton is followed by binding and brushing the weights，With IK on the legs, the character’s feet don’t elongate with movement, preventing the character from turning into something like Disney Rubberman during the animation process.
Weights: auto-generated weights can easily connect fingers together, so some adjustments have to be made to the hands, in addition to this auto weights often connect hair to clothes, this time it is necessary to go from bone level to bone level to check and erase the excess weights.
Face rigging:
How to use faciel：
1.The first step is to place the dots on the character’s face in the positions that determine the controller’s eye sockets, nose, chin, brow bone, orbicularis oris muscle, etc., which is suitable for all kinds of exaggerated cartoon images.
2.Refinement of weights – Correction of expressions (sculpting/skeletal method) – Baking，This generates a semi-finished product of the controller，
Generate an animation of the character’s expression, and next tweak it in blendshape to create smiles, sadness, anger, surprise, and so on. And make a pout, wide open mouth, crooked mouth, and pursed lips. Raise your eyebrows, frown, etc.
3.Irregular binding
how to bind irregular eyelashes? How to change their nature during expression changes? How to bind them to the character’s eyelids?
I learnt that binding is based on a hierarchical relationship. Forming a parent-child set of lashes and faces allows the lashes to follow the face.Lower eye lashes were found to be immobile, at first I thought it was a problem with the binding or because of the asymmetry (which didn’t work even after removing half the mirrors) Finally I tried to increase the weights and found that they weren’t automatically assigned to the upper weights.
Eyeballs: inwardly recessed round pieces were used here. I tried that the eyeballs of the spheres would be incongruous on the character, although that would be easy on the bindings (as with traditional character bindings), though less visually pleasing. So ended up making flaky eyes, with the depressions appearing to be deep eyes. Here brings a new problem: how to bind irregular eyeballs？
In order to make the eyeballs (2D character eyeballs are slices not spheres, based on the principle that the faciel binding is rotating around the object, a new sphere is created as the centre to control the face of the character’s eyes)
4.Since the two controllers are not compatible, I tried binding the expression controller to the body skeleton before making the blendshape, which worked but the face controller maintained a half-finished state, I initially bound the expression controller to the bone controller and found that I couldn’t follow the movement. Then bound the expression controller to the neck skeleton, which produced a lot of reported errors.
Then I explored further and found a way that I could keep the face controller and the two controllers work properly as colleagues, binding the face to the head object through the parent-child hierarchy.