Ramblings about rigging, programming and games.

Basemesh

This base mesh was built with deformation in mind and is based on the three curves principle. You can read more about the theory behind it. You can read more about that under the download links.

It is distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license. Giving you permission to use, modify and share it for any purpose as long as you give appropriate credit (see the license file included with the downloads).

You can download it for free on any of the following stores.

The Three Curves Principle

Good topology will help tremendously in achieving good deformation and will also help speed up the rigging process by a significant margin.

My basemesh is based on the Three Curves Principle which you can learn more about in this video.

The Three Curves principle is something I'll apply for both the eyes and the mouth. On the unsubdivided basemesh, you can see that the eyelids and mouth are all built in the very same way:

Core Edges

The Edges highlighted in red are the core edges necessary to support the three curves principle and the green ones are there to support the corners and have better control over them later on.

Now speaking of curves right now is a bit far fetched and the mesh is way to low poly to support the shape of the face. The basemesh meant to be as low poly as possible and then be subdivided based on the project's needs. Having it as low poly as this also helps fitting it quickly on any other head model and is more precise than tools like wrap3 (but definitely not as fast). Here it is after being subdivided two times and re-projected to the scan and a bit of manual tweaking:

Core Edges SubD2

I'll probably go over this in a future post but the neat thing here is that now each couple of core edges has exactly 3 edges in between. If you're making a joint based rig, this means that you can place your joints on the core vertices and then precisely assign the weights to the vertices in between to control the curve of the eyelids/lips exactly like you want it.

Important Loops

Now that we have a grasp of why we need these edges, let's talk a bit about the important edge loops.

loops_colored