In these two weeks, we were given a model of the head. We were supposed to create a rig, face blenshapes and an animation. Using sculpting tools I sculpted various blend shapes. I decided to create 3 faces – happy, sad and angry. After this, I went about creating a joint structure. I binded the skin of the mesh to the joints to move it around. I also had to make sure to have a correct hierarchy and to parent objects that are not attached to the head. Then I created splines controllers and parented them with joints. When I tried to move the jaw the face would warp due to wrong skin weights. I had to paint my own skin weights. The weight painting wasn’t easy but in the end, I managed to make it work. Using blendshapes I also created a blinking face. I used soft selection to grab faces and morph them to make eyelids closed.
I used limit information to limit the spline rotations only to certain thresholds. This was later helpful for animating.
For rendering, I created a bump map using a noise map to give the face more detail. I used subsurface scattering to simulate light going through the skin.