I have an artist friend who created her own VTuber (virtual youtuber) to stream and while briefly watching her try to rig the virtual character she drew, I realized that this is actually a very difficult and involved process. Many layers need to be drawn as when a character moves a body part, it might occlude another part of the body or reveal another part of the scene. The rigging itself is difficult too, as you often have to define how a character's features will move and if they should move in relation to another (moving the arm should move the hand) or if not (moving the arm should not move the leg).
melodysifry
For facial expressions especially, I imagine that rigging can get extremely complex. In the same way that we use a skeleton to model larger body movements, do animators need to model the way that all of our many facial muscles move and contract in order to create facial expressions? Does this mean that when creating characters, decisions about the size, shape and position of these facial muscles need to be made along with what the character will look like externally?
I have an artist friend who created her own VTuber (virtual youtuber) to stream and while briefly watching her try to rig the virtual character she drew, I realized that this is actually a very difficult and involved process. Many layers need to be drawn as when a character moves a body part, it might occlude another part of the body or reveal another part of the scene. The rigging itself is difficult too, as you often have to define how a character's features will move and if they should move in relation to another (moving the arm should move the hand) or if not (moving the arm should not move the leg).
For facial expressions especially, I imagine that rigging can get extremely complex. In the same way that we use a skeleton to model larger body movements, do animators need to model the way that all of our many facial muscles move and contract in order to create facial expressions? Does this mean that when creating characters, decisions about the size, shape and position of these facial muscles need to be made along with what the character will look like externally?