Face test revisited

As you know I've stated numerous times that by this point on my Vince character would be ready to animate. Once again I must admit, hes not quite ready. I've shown Vince to various people and many have pointed out problems with the model or texture and have since then put more effort into really polishing the areas suggested. The primary issue with the textures was a direct result of the UV layout. This forced me to redo the UV layout and consequently redo the texture maps, ambient occlusion maps and normals maps. Despite the additional time put into the surface detail the model as a whole looks a lot better and I feel more confident about rigging at this point without having to do unnecessary backtracking.

Previously I would texture the model, give it a quick look an make an assessment as to whether or not it was ready to rig. In the above image I've re-textured and rigged the model and jumped ahead to facial rigging. The facial setup ended up being the most problematic and was the primary reason for delay beyond the texture work.

These were all quick tests I rendered out after having rigged the face. For the most part they look pretty good, but the further down you go the worse the face behaves. As clearly evident in the last test, the eyes rotate through the mesh, the eyes clip through the eyelids when closed, the teeth protrude through the upper lip and mustache on certain poses and the lower lip behaves in an unwanted manner.

My particular method or pipeline for my Vince character has thus far been:

-sketch up a characted on paper/photoshop
-create orthographic proofs for us inside maya
-create the base model in maya
-layout the uvs
-refine the 3d model in zbrush
-generate normals in maya using the refined zbrush model
-paint the base textures
-create ambient occlusion textures
-refine all maps as needed
-rig the body
-refine the body rig/weights
-rig the face

The problem with this current method is that after rigging the body and refining weights, if I find that the facial rig isn't behaving as I'd like it to as a result of the mesh I'm forced to refine the mesh which then forces me to re-rig the entire body after having done all the refinements.

I should have been rigging the face first, testing the behavior of the rig, make changes to the mesh as needed, then finally rig the body and re-rig the face then from that point on refine the weights as need be, after which I could begin animating.

This problem cost me a lot of time rigging and re-rigging but hopefully from this point on I'll really have a character ready to animate within the next few days.

Be on the lookout for a ready to animate character in the coming days.