Blend Morphs or Bones

[jaakay]

Hi All,

Newbie question:

I was watching a tutorial on youtube today where bones were put on the face to make new expressions, eyes opening and closing, looking right or left, smiling etc.

Is there any special reason why you would do this over using blend morphs or is it just personal preference?

[GCharb]

Many ways of doing expression, bones. blend morph, point animation etc.

I would say it depends on what you want to achieve, I doubt you could have all the subtleties of point animation or blend morph by using bones, but it just might do for your particular production needs.

I am working with blend morph these days, powerful, but need getting used to, point animation is a breeze, but you cant really automate it, as you can with blend morph.

Bone animation could be a middle of those, faster to setup then blend morph, but not as intuitive as point animation.

Try all of these techniques, and see for yourself, it will clear any doubts you may have by asking other peoples!

[jonbo]

Hey jaakay, the best reason is better control. Sometimes when there are a bunch of points, it can get messy. But you can have a rig like you describe and have it set up to do blend morphs. So you can easily use the bone tools like rotate or scale to move the points bound to the bone around and then use the reset on the bone to return the points to default. I have a face rig set up like you seen to do blend morphs so I get the best of both ways.

[Víctor Paredes]

I use bones, blend morph and point animation, all in the rig. For example, I use bones for the body rig, but I put the head inside a bone layer too, there I put bones binded to the eyebrows, the mouth, the eyes, the pupils and the nose. I put a parent bone for entire face, so, if I want to move an specific part, I move the specific bone, if I want to move the whole face, I move one single bone. It keeps things clean.
Then I make 1 frame actions for the frame (to use with blend morph). This way you can control the blend morph plus the bones, so you get more freedom.
When I want a movement which can't be done with bones and blend morph, just move the points.