Retro Convoy Character Compositions

During test animations for the first Retro Convoy short movie, I found some aspects of the character rigs lacking. Arms clipped through jackets, creases scrunched together awkwardly, and so on (nothing ruins a good shot like the flickering of inverted normals).

Going back into old work to fix things is always a precarious process, since usually you start uncovering all sorts of other things you could fix/improve, and before you know it you're redoing the whole project. That's not always a bad thing, and while I spent more time fixing the "rigging" than I'd intended, I was happy to go back and touch up some of the materials and design on the original Substance file.

In Substance Painter, I touched up things like belt buckles, pockets, added some zippers, and things like that. Rege also has some sweet little sideburns now.

The first version of this rig used bones to rotate and move mesh objects on the face. This gave room for lots of movement with the eyebrows, but the execution was finicky and perhaps there was TOO much room for movement (our eyebrow movement is varied, but each motion is carried out in a similar way).

And as you can see, I got a little lazy with the bone shapes on the first rig.

With the updated rig, I used shape keys for the facial expressions, which needed to be animated with bones in order to make the whole thing linkable into another project (in a linked rig, ONLY the armature is accessible, the mesh data (shape keys) are not). This was a "I knew it was too easy" moment, as I assumed I could just use the shapekey sliders themselves on a linked mesh, but instead I was forced to doll the model up with fancy bone-shapes and constraint sliders. It was worth it, but I could have used that time to play Fortnite or something.

Somewhere along the line I thought to add shapekeys on the separated mouth-plane itself, allowing to expand the range of facial expressions and give emphasis to smirks and frowns (mostly smirks though, since these characters are smarmy™).

Now the question is how much of the rig to import to various characters; the temptation is to append this rig setup to a base character from which to construct all future characters from, but how much variation should be allowed?

One possibility is shapekey drivers used for creation of new characters, to adjust ear and eye size, etc. These shapekey modifiers would then be applied (something you rarely want to do!) and a new, separate character created.. A key goal of this universe is to apply some uniformity to the shapes/materials, and pulling from the same basic set of character shapes would help.

Further research is needed! For now though I'm moving on to scene blocking.

Well, Fornite, then scene blocking.