CCP Games: EVE Online and World of Darkness Custom Facial Rig
I was brought in with a small group of character people for the task of adding 3D avatars to EVE Online and the World of Darkness title that was being developed simultaneously. My responsibilities were mainly for character, creature, prop rigging and general technical knowledge for proper geometry edgeflows and animation setup. All characters shown were created by Steven Stahlberg.
EVE's custom character creator. My face rig was shared between every character no matter how customized. During customization, the skinning would reverse, and the mesh drove the joint placement. Once customized the skinning switched back to joint driven.
Example of how robust the custom character creator can be to create a huge variety of character avatars. All models by Steven Stahlberg.
We asked our players to use the custom character generator to see if they could make celebrity faces. These are the some of the best ones, and they were all created in-game with no additional assets.
The face was flexible enough to share animations between EVE Online and World of Darkness, male/female and all races even after full customization by the player. There were multiple layers of controls for the animators and the panel was also customizable.
The soft eyes had the eyelids move along with them regardless if they were open or closed. There was also a way to blend control over to a look at controller with individual eye control.
Joint based soft eyes solution that could be blended with a traditional LookAt constraint control in the scene. Lids are reactive to eyeball rotation, so even when closed and the eyeball rotates, you can see the lids move slightly.
Example of how the joint based facial rigs control system worked. In addition to these, each joint could be controlled individually, or in small groups to fine tune the poses.
How the sticky lips solution worked. It could be auto driven or animated, and when set to closed, the lips would stay shut no matter what animation was playing.
The facial animation rig controller and all the attributes it drives. It uses Osipa style controls, with custom R click menus on each controller for matching, mirroring, reset to zero, etc.
All joint positions could be fine tuned with individual controls. The blue spheres would turn red to let animators know if they were keyframed.
Example of the right click menu for the eye controller. Every controller had a custom context sensitive right click menu for frequent animator tasks.
More right click context sensitive menus.
In addition to the right click menus, there were custom attributes on controls for things like finger curls, but could always be blended/switched to animator control.