Introduction

Facial rigging is one of the most complex areas of character rigging. There is no single “correct” approach: every studio, every production, and every visual style comes with its own constraints, priorities, and habits. As a result, facial systems vary widely, both in structure and in philosophy.

Because of this diversity, facial rigging is notoriously difficult to standardize or automate. In practice, many solutions grow organically into collections of tools, scripts, and workarounds that hold together just well enough to ship a show. On the other end of the spectrum, some systems rely on highly abstracted modules that are extremely powerful but behave like black boxes, making them hard to customize or adapt once you step outside their intended use cases.

Mikan takes a different approach. The framework does not enforce a specific facial rigging methodology. Instead, it is designed to stay out of your way and let you adapt the tools to your own needs. The system is flexible enough to reproduce most existing facial setups, whether they are simple or highly elaborate, while leaving the design decisions in your hands.

That flexibility comes with a trade-off: Mikan is not inherently pedagogical. It will not teach you how to build a facial rig by itself. This chapter therefore provides a guided walkthrough for building a facial rig prototype based on systems used in our previous productions. The setup presented here is far from perfect and is intentionally open to improvement. Its purpose is to give you a concrete overview of what the framework makes possible.

By the end of this chapter, you should have a clearer understanding of how to assemble your own facial rig using Mikan, and how to adapt the framework to match your preferred workflow. From there, you are free to focus on what you probably enjoy most anyway: rigging.