He's inspired by Pixar's latest opus. I got busy after seeing their first Luca teaser, which I think is the perfect 1 minute little story btw.. I wish I could make one that good, it's not easy to make some sense of a story, characters, and setting, in just 1 minute of film.
So I wanted to do some facial animation, but I was unhappy with the free [and not-free] off-the-shelf rigs out there. I wanted a clean face rig, with perfect clean splines, no wobbly imperfections.. as much as possible. It's crazy hard to keep all shapes clean tho, and I've definitely not reached perfection yet. :D
My face rig is also not as flexible as others, it's somewhat limited. And this is my rigging philosophy basically. The idea is to easily achieve certain shapes, at the expense of detailed, localized control [which could muddy up things]. It's supposed to be used for clean, pixarish shapes, Luca-style, not for realistic FACS-based animation, and not for Everything You Could Possibly Dream Of. So for example, pretty much all face rigs I ever used have one way to open to mouth. I have multiple ways to achieve different Aaah ans Ooos. And the animator is supposed to get a bit artsy at times, with teeth positioning, maybe ears tweaking for best angles, but especially with mouth shapes. The eyes are supersimple, only basic blinking is allowed, no shaping of the eyelids. For above-mentioned style reasons.
I'm thinking of offering this as a Free Rig, but it needs a few more tweaks. : ]
For now, just a quick face animation test. Audio file extracted from this little gem called Stand by Me [1986].
And a quick preview of the face UI. It's a lot of fun to use! :D