I wrote a post in Mercator Project’s blog about the facial setup of one of the leading characters “Virginia”.

I’m copying all the explanations from the post here.

Virginia’s Facial Rig from Mercator Project on Vimeo.

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I finally found some time to study pyconstraints and I must say I had great fun with them. Pyconstraints (Python Constraints) are custom constraints coded in python by the user, they let us modify the behavior of bones any way we like. Luckily there is a pyconstraint template bundled with Blender and available in the Text Editor where 50% of the job is done for us. We “only” need to fill in the “original” part.

I’m happy to show you my first pyconstraint ! Actually is my second one, but the first mildly useful… so. Here it is ! The X-Pivot constraint ! (<--- yeah go download the blend now !)
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Leandro “Cesio” Inocencio and I were trying to figure out a way to set up a rig in a similar fashion than the fantastic rig from Victor Vinyals demo reel, with smooth IK/FK blending, autosnapping and UI simpleness as Pepeland’s Red Nelb.

Lots of features missing in the Blender API as well as bugs in Blender, were stopping us to get what we wanted. Fortunately, Campbell Barton and Joshua Leung were there to help coding the needed API commands and fixing the annoying bugs and we succeed at getting the smooth IK/FK blending which was the most difficult part (actually it was Joshua who provided us a sample code that put us on the right track).I finally applied all these tests and ideas into one single rig for my Maloyó Project.

You can see the rig demo here -> www.malefico3d.org/movies/maloyo_rig.avi and in YouTube.

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I have just written a small but useful (at least for me) python script I’d like to share with you. This program creates geometry for every deforming bone in an armature and parent it to them, so you can have a “solid armature” that could be rendered with lights and texture as any regular mesh.

To try it just download it from here and copy it to the Blender python scripts folder (in linux it is blender_folder/.blender/scripts ) start Blender, and run the script from “Armature Modeler” entry in Animation menu in Python window. (more…)