Chapter 10

Shapes and Morphing

Before we begin animating the character using the rig in Chapter 9, there is one more bit of work that needs to be done. The armature and bone system is perfect for making deformations that in real life would be driven by a skeleton or other kind of rigid structure. While the human face is partially driven by this method (the jaw), for the most part its great expressiveness is created by muscles that are attached to the skull, pulling and bunching the skin of the face. You could set up a bone structure to try to do this (it’s been done!), but there is a more intuitive method for achieving this kind of animation.

Our goal as animators is to achieve specific shapes and configurations of the face (expressions, like ...

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