Enhanced Facial Rig & Animation

I have a fully modelled and generally well-rigged human character, but the face is letting the whole performance down. What I need now is a specialist who can breathe life into the facial rig so that it delivers convincing lip sync and the four key emotions—happy, sad, angry, and surprised—without the mesh collapsing or stretching unnaturally.

The body controls, weights, and IK chains are already in good shape, so your attention can stay on the head: refining skin weights around the jaw, cheeks, and eyes; adding or polishing blend-shapes/shape keys for phonemes; and making sure the controls are intuitive enough for quick animation passes. Feel free to work in Maya, Blender, or any other mainstream package as long as you can hand back an FBX and the native file.

I will supply:
• The current rigged model (native file + FBX)
• A short test audio clip for lip-sync evaluation
• Turntable reference video of the existing deformation issues

Deliver back to me:
• Updated rig with clean, labeled facial controls
• A short test animation that hits the supplied audio and shows all four emotions
• Clear notes on anything I should know to keep the rig stable in production

Acceptance criteria:
• Jaw, lips, and cheeks follow audio naturally with no obvious mesh collapse
• Happy, sad, angry, and surprised poses read clearly from every camera angle
• No new skinning artifacts introduced elsewhere on the model

If that sounds like your kind of challenge, let’s get started—I’m ready to drop the files to you right away.