Face Rig

Time for some skill upgrade. I am trying to build a face rig not there yet but I have started with the sculpting. Please give some crits. Think of this as a Tangled, Frozen style female toon face.






Its really cool!!! Retope it before u rig!!

I will be watching this with interest; especially sense I’m working on this style of character right now and would love to give it a proper rig.

@secretkeys Thanks dude, no choice on the re-topology part of the equation. The sculpt is a dynamic topology work and there is no way to rig that for faces.

@Atemporalskill Thanks

Okay I am done with the re-topology all quad no n-gons and tris in sight and I am pretty happy with it. I learnt a lot from looking at the work of Clayton Osmus, Sze Jones, Dan Platt, Hippydrome and from the many thoughts that Tamas Varga shares over at cgtalk. I also looked work at some of my past heads and come up with this. I am pretty happy with this expect I think next time I will keep the n-poles on the side of the head on the same edge loop lane. I saw that on a Sze Jones head, but man it caused me more headaches than I care to recall.



Now I just want to tweak the sculpt a bit, I am not happy with the ear lobes and I want to make the eyes a bit bigger. Than its time for the teeth, tongue, eyes and the modeling will be done.

Very cool ! I look forward to see more !

Great work, maybe your ear is little small than normal, pinna need to enlarge and rework to form, that’s all!

The topology is nice yes, however it looks like you squashed the head a bit while creating it. This may be my personal opinion but I acutually prefer the sculpt a lot more. The face is longer and slimmer in the sculpt. I feel you lost a lot of the character when you retopo’d it.

@cletort4 thanks bro

@3d|slider thanks, I kind of like the smaller ears I know disney of tangled and frozen did bigger ears and eyes but for some reason I liked Helen The Incredibles smaller ears and eyes.

I did the sculpt renders with a camera that didn’t have a 1:1 aspect ratio, my bad, so it is stretched out and is not an accurate view of what the model looks like. The re-topoed model is closer to the truth.

Thanks for your comments everyone though I can’t really use them because I have moved on to doing the teeth, eyes and skin shaders and I would just be noodling my model at this point If I want back to sculpting.

This is what happens when you spend your time doing nothing but cars in Blender. You get a humbling reminder of how little else you know.


This is a BI skin shader I am working on because Cycles just takes too long to render, the are no textures at the moment just simple colours. I was getting plus 10 minutes for a clean SSS render in Cycles, in BI it’s under 1 minute if I use buffered shadow lamps. This render is with area lights so it took about 2 minutes.

To any BI masters out there are there any special considerations you need to take when you build a mesh and render it with shadow buffers? I keep getting annoying light leaks with this mesh. This reminds me of why I hate legacy render engines, every thing is a bloody chore. You want to have soft shadows you play around with settings, you want buffered shadows you play around with yet more cryptic settings.

Cycles is so logical but sadly too slow for my needs so I will just soldier on with BI.

I got some teeth done but there is still plenty of tweaking left to do to get them just right. I followed Pixar’s lead on this one, I am taking screen shot from most of the DVDs I own and simplified from reality so its 24 teeth not the usual 32.



Looks like your doing some nice work here. I’m working on the same problems but I jumped into the full figure and know almost nothing about blender. I currently have eye blink issues

I do some pretty quick renders with simple blender render settings. I am no master so I try and research what others have done and here are some fast settings, I’m not going for a final look just cool enough to give me a nice feel.

I use some Subsurface Scattering for the eyes and I did a bake for the basic skin and then a bit of hand painting on the texture map. I also added some cloud texture for some quick skin.

My Key Light is a spot light that uses buffer shadow:

Soft: 6, size: 2460
Bias: 0.001 Samples: 3

My other 2 lights, fill and back light are hemi with diffuse only on.

I don’t know if that will help …it gets me a quick but nice view of what I’m doing. I figure I’ll get better later but I want fast renders of under a min.


@James_Z thanks for the info, I don’t think I have tried spot lights with that small a bias yet I think I will give that a go.

I think I have pretty much finished the modeling work on this. Here is a shot of the teeth with gums,



and a render test using area lights


Looking good, that face came out really good. She’s going to be pretty when you add in some hair.

How are the render times?

My current times are 00:37.89 for a 560 x 860, @ 50%, gather: aproximate, png, size 73.7 KB

That is with is hair particles on. Seems pretty good to me, hard to say since I’m such a noob with Blender 2.7

The gums have a ridge between each tooth. Looks like they need a tweak to smooth that out? That mesh looks pinched.


Your lights look good, nice edge light.

I am now continuing work on this. I have about 100 pages to read between now and the weekend to finally start building some shape keys. I made the stupid error of leaving this project on my flash drive, it went belly up some months back. I thought I lost everything.

But a week back I was trying to recover another file and noticed an auto-save file from the last time I worked on this so I was saved.

working on the last crit from months back smoothing out the pinches in my gums.


I thought I will give low poly hand painted textures a rest and practice rigging this month. I have started working on my shape keys, first WIP shot of the insincere smile. It’s insincere because it doesn’t have a squint like a real smile but the squint is its own shape.


left is default right is smile. I am still not sure if I should make the nasal labial fold prominent like in a realistic smile, I guess I will be watching a lot of disney and pixar cartoons this weekend.

This is the first smile I have done that didn’t look like crap there is still a ton of work to do on it.

I played around with the smile a bit more


also started with the narrow


looks great man. this is the stage that always makes me crazy. freaky white eyeballs!

Is this done by drivers?

@Modron it’s already driving me up the wall. If I survive I planning another character and I try and document it all down if I can save person from this much hair pulling then my mission is accomplished

@XeroShadow that is the direction it’s headed in but as of right now it’s just a face with blend shapes/shape keys there is a lot of keys I have to sculpt.

I had to redo everything as I messed up on my mouth wall so this pic is of a new smile mixed with an upper lip up, if I added in a slight lower lip down then you would get the classical toothy smile. But this looks like shit, so much tweaking to do so little time.


Brow shapes…I’m starting to see why hobbyist avoid face rigs and facial animation nothing but a giant PITA