Meet Storm.
Blender Studio has started Project Storm, a new production-ready character asset that should help artists improve their facial rigging workflow using bones, shapekeys, and additional tools, "where expressions and deformations are carefully sculpted and integrated into a non-destructive workflow."
"Our goal is to create a high-quality character rig that meets today’s industry standards, fully prepared for animation and lighting. With this approach, we aim to make the facial rig more intuitive for animators, allowing expressions to be easily posed using predesigned deformations, while still offering the flexibility to tweak and adjust as needed. This will help animators stay on model and achieve facial appeal more efficiently. Ultimately, we believe this will make animating not only faster but a lot more fun!"
Blender Studio
The concept art of the character was created by Vivien Lulkowski and Julien Kaspar in collaboration with Rik Schutte, the project's lead. Blender introduced new tools and improved existing ones for the character in order to support the workflow described in the Facial Rigging with Shape Keys article.
Schutte made custom scripts like enhanced shape key operators, improvements to weight painting, and driver automation features.
Blender Studio
"A big component of this workflow is the use of 'Override Transforms'. This feature has been updated with new functionality that allows to attach control bones to vertices and update the gizmo to their visual location. This means control bones follow any mesh deformation and can be manipulated without creating dependency cycles."
Blender Studio
The boy's body rig is being developed by Demeter Dzadik using his Cloud Rig add-on. Project Storm is a WIP, and Blender will keep everyone interested updated through weekly production logs.
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