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Brow Shapes Naming Conventions

by user87 posted 21-06-2018 | 3 comments

Hey y'all,

I'm currently working in a shape based facial rigging environment and we are trying to iron out our blendshape naming conventions. The brows have been a point of contention as I would like to stick to clear intuitive names and avoid duplicate sounding names.

For example, we have three regions of the brow: inner('inn'), middle('mid'), outer('out'). We also have four directions per region: in, out, up, and down. This ends up with shapes named like lf_inn_in, lf_out_out, lf_inn_out, which doesn't really sit well with me.

So far I haven't really come up with any other great ways to identify the regions of a brow, but there are a couple different direction options. Replacing 'in'/'out' with 'push'/'pull' seems sort of up to interpretation, 'med'/'lat' for medial/lateral ends up with lf_mid_med situations, and 'fwd'/'back' implies some change to depth.

Thought I might check here if there are better ways of handling this stuff. I figure there aren't many places that actually care about naming conventions, but I know y'all get me!

 

by user3 posted 27-06-2018

Hi!

Yeah, I've always disliked the in_in, in_out, out_out names, but as ugly as they look I find them quite clear.

 

by user203 posted 25-06-2018

instead of inner/middle/outer you could go super simple with A/B/C, and keep in/out, up/down. So it would become lf_brow_A_in/lf_brow_A_out. You could use this in every section of the face you want regions for pretty easily as well: lips, cheeks, eyelid, etc. And, if you decide you need to add another region, you can just add another letter without coming up with some other new name for the region.

The only real drawback is that if you wanted to add a region between A and B, it would 'rename' the other regions. But, that's really only an issue if you need to retain the other names so the animation doesn't break... If you plan it all out well enough, that is usually not an issue, but you could also create a tool to shift animation keys from the old name to the new one...

 

by user87 posted 25-06-2018

Hey silent_sight, thanks for your reply. I think that's a great suggestion. We may even be able to avoid the drawback you mentioned as animation has apparently settled on the number of controls they want. We'll see how long that lasts. :P