Facing the FACS: Post Mortem

I want to start by saying thank you to the gentleman on LinkedIn who suggested this amazing title. I'm upset I didn't come up with it myself lol

I'm really happy that I finally finished the rig and I'm overall satisfied with how it turned out. Here are some thoughts I had along the way which I wanted to share:

1) I started this project 2 years ago. That being said, the expectations I had then were different than the expectations I had recently. I learned a ton in these two years that I wish I had better applied to this rig, but the foundation had already been set two years ago, if that makes any sense. In the future, I'll either try to finish a project quicker or completely restart to avoid this issue.

2) For FACS, I think I would have preferred if the rig was completely blendshape-based. I didn't have all the shapes I needed so I tried to compensate with some joints here and there. In retrospect, there was nothing stopping me from using the sculpt tool in Maya and making those blendshapes myself, aside from lazyness and time constraints.

3) I wish it had been more faithful to the FACS theory. I think I did an ok job exploring the overall concept, but there are SO many smaller muscles that create facial expressions, I wish I had gone more in depth.

4) Really proud of myself for finishing the project despite having room for improvement. Not a lot of people go out of their way to improve their skillset outside of work and I think it's important to celebrate that as well!

5) I'm very happy with how much I learned about recording and editing the video tutorials.

6) Also very happy about how I organized myself for this project even though there were some hiccups along the way. I usually breakdown my projects using a checkbox list method I learned from Every Tool's a Hammer by Adam Savage. I super recommend this (and the book too):

Thank you so much for your support and I'm excited to share more projects with you all in the future :)

-Fernanda