This is the most complex rig that I have ever made. I found this model on Turbosquid and thought that she would be a lot of fun to rig. Her name is Nyra and she seems to be some type of futuristic samurai.
There were several things that I wanted to learn while working on her rig. I wanted to learn more about more complex facial controls and I wanted to learn how to do ribbon rigs.
This is a video showing many of the controls that I made for her character.
https://www.loom.com/embed/d3605dccbc014c98beeb9a845c32d646
These are the facial controls that I made for Nyra, all of the colored circles move different parts of her face. These controls allow Nyra's face to move with a combination of joints and weight painting and blend shapes.
Here is a picture of all of Nyra's facial joints. There are a couple of extra facial controls that are surrounding her face. Her eyes follow the light blue control in front of her that has yellow and blue controls inside of it. If her eyes need to rotate separately the yellow and blue controls allow her eyes to look in different directions. The red oval shaped controls move her tongue and the light blue control in front of her mouth moves the lower part of her face. The purple control inside the light blue control moves her lips.
To learn how to ribbon rig I used some of the clothing pieces Nyra is wearing. To create the ribbon rigs on Nyra I used a combination of nurbs planes, nHair, and two different deformers twist and sine.
