Animating with Blender

Blender’s Method for Controlling Facial Expressions

Facial expressions and animation are crucial to a finished character animation project. When working with facial animation in Blender, you have the deformation tools that were already presented in the previous chapter: armature/vertex group, mesh cage, and lattice. However, none of those alone can provide you with the flexibility and fine control that you need to create emotive facial expressions. Blender’s system for directly creating, storing, and animating different shapes and deformations of a mesh is called Shape Keys.

Note

Everything in this chapter can also be applied to situations other than facial expressions. Any detailed and exact mesh deformation can be handled with the tools presented ...