Expression Gallery (Patreon)

Marrazan's suggestion was to make more expressive faces. Now I know this has been a weakness of mine ever since I started. I think it's a mix of safety and the lack of a proper facial rig. Every time I deviate from that, it often looks mediocre. So that's why I've always stuck to the minor changes. And honestly after so many months, I've grown blind to it.

However after messing around for a while, I realized it'll be way trickier than anticipated. The issue with my current setup is that I have to redo whatever facial rig I have setup beforehand. This is because I still use AG3 to create the faces for every character. Importing that into 3ds Max and wiring up to the template body only takes about five minutes.

But if I were to truly expand the facial rig, I'd have to do that for every character. And that can take from 30 to an hour of work, but that's purely estimation. I think that's fine for my OCs, but not the one-off characters that I sometimes make. But having a deviation between the two will make everything tougher to manage.

So unless I find a way to save time on the 'transfer' or eliminate the AG3 step, making an advanced facial rig for everyone would be an extremely time-consuming process. Fortunately, there's plenty that I can improve on by using the current rig, as is probably proven by the 'angry' expression. I just have to push myself more towards more experimentation and not settle with the easy route.