Face Controls 8.1 Mouth Corners

[Rakete]

I am experimenting with the Face Controls, and I wondering how the Mouth Corners of the Face Controls are supposed to be setup. As far as I understand the prefered setup would use the poseable bones that the addon can add. So when I do that I get bones ending with either (drv) or (fin), where the (fin) ones are used in the drivers that control properties of the face rig, and these properties are then used in drivers that control the shape keys of the imported mesh (I need to either merge the rigs, or change the shape key driver so it uses the face rig, instead of the main rig for that to work).

The (drv) bones are only there to be driven by properties. I am not really using that, but after reading http://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/p/corrections-section-13.html I assume loading an expression would change some properties, those would drive the (drv) bones, and their children bones are the bones that drive the shape keys, therefore applying the expression to the mesh.

But then for the specific case of the Mouth_Corners (not only those, but those seem like the most complex part) there are a whole bunch of other bones where I find it difficult to figure out how it is all supposed to work together:

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I assume the bone ending with 2 are meant to replicate the behaviour in daz, where the main bone control only the left/right side alone, and then the little + bone controls both sides at the same time. And I’ve already tried to replicate that behaviour in blender in a naive way with drivers, resulting in circular driver dependencies which did not work at all, so I suppose all those extra bones in the screenshot are necessary to replicate that mirroring behaviour somehow.

Through experimentation I already have the face controls working fairly well, but I assume in a somewhat awkward way. So I marked this as a proposal, since I think the face controls are working perfectly fine, but it would be very helpful to get a bit more documentation about the technical details, so people (or maybe just me in this case) can figure out how to make use of them properly.

[Thomas Larsson]

No, I don’t think you should make the face control bones poseable, but I never tried. Probably better to merge all other rigs first, make them poseable, and merge the face control at the end. But I really haven’t used the face controls, so I don’t know what is best.

The L2 and R2 bones are in the duf file. They don’t make much sense to me, at least not in a Blender context, but the importer imports what is in the file.

[Joe Fix]

I am having trouble making a character’s beard follow FACS units or expressions. Is there a way to fix this?

[Thomas Larsson]

Transfer shapekeys https://diffeomorphic.blogspot.com/p/morphs-section-version-16.html

[Joe Fix]

Brilliant, thanks! This is such a well-made addon.

[Rakete]

I ended up spending quite a bit of time trying to replicate how the face controls work in daz, in blender. Mainly by using drivers and “Make bones poseable” so that I can have drivers on a bone (to for example move the left side mouth corner together with the right side corner, when the little plus is moved), and still have them poseable. But in the end I decided it just adds to much complexity and ended up using a much simpler approach using just “Child of” constraints.

I also did not merge any rigs, instead I created drivers that drive the FACS Units with the Face Control properties. I felt like I had to do this anyways because saving an animation back to DAZ would not use the Face Control properties/shape keys, but would only work if the values in the FACS Units panel changed. So in the armature properties, go to the custom properties, right click a property (for example "facs_BrowDownLeft(fin)"), the “Copy as new driver”, go to the FACS Units panel in the DAZ Importer, right click “Brown Down Left” and then “Paste Driver”.

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