Pose Face Rig manually while using Expressions

[Markus]

Hello,

in this example ( Gif: https://gyazo.com/e400309570376431d9822b9c537bc9cf ) I used three different Expressions and they work very good. For sure I wanted to tweak them by adding some custom eye blinks and stuff like that on top of the animation. Unfortunately there pops up an error when I try to “make bones posable”. It says: “error: MHX Rig.”

If I want to use the eyelid bones (rotation) it doesn’t work because some transforms are driven by drivers because of the expressions. So is there another workaround how I can manually animate and tweak my face bones while using expressions? It would be so powerful if that would work somehow. Every help is appreciated.

Best regards

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[Alessandro Padovani]

You have to make the bones posable before converting to mhx. Easy import can do it for you.

[Markus]

I understand. And there is no way to make this happen with my existing character which is already converted to a mhx rig? Maybe revert it temporarily to add that custom layer on top which is needed?

I invested quite a lot of time to set the character up with bunch of custom work and now I wanted to animate it. What would be the best workflow now for me to not start from scratch?

[Thomas Larsson]

Unfortunately there is no way to un-mhx a character. I usually save a blend file with the original rig before converting to mhx, so I can come back to it later.

[Thomas Larsson]

On the other hand, it should be possible to make bones in the periphery posable , i.e. face, fingers, toes. MHX and Rigify introduce a lot of complications for the main body bones, but not for the periphery. I need to think about that.

[Thomas Larsson]

Hah! You can use Advanced Setup > Rigging > Add Extra Face Bones, which does the same thing but only for the face bones. This was the original tool for making bones posable, but was deprecated in favor of the more general tool, and I had thought of removing it completely. Fortunately I did not.

[Alessandro Padovani]

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