wk FaceRig

Create expressive, flexible face rigs for artists

This add-on is designed to make facial animation in Blender both fast and intuitive. Instead of wiring drivers by hand or building complex node setups, you create a handful of slider controllers and map your shape keys, bones, or object transforms directly to them.

The system handles all driver creation automatically — including left/right asymmetry

The result is a clean, minimal setup with controllers that behave exactly the way you expect, whether you're working on talking-head shots, stylized characters, or quick curve-based facial rigs.

At any moment you can add slider controls to your slider groups, create new drivers, edit your blend shapes. Quick testing, tweaking, new testing, finalizing. Easy as pie.

Why it matters

Animators can work significantly faster when the rig stays out of their way. With this tool, shaping and setting up a complete facial rig becomes a short, predictable process:

Sculpt your face shapes symmetrically. The tool automatically splits them into left/right versions. Map everything onto your custom sliders in one pass. Start animating immediately.

This workflow produces natural, smooth face motion without the usual trial-and-error.

Be faster.

In practice, 40–60 seconds of animation per day (Talking Heads without complex body mechanics) are realistic!

Example production times

The examples shown on the product page were created with the following approximate timings:

Talking head ("Oh, ah, that was easy") with classic BlendShapes

Face shape sculpting: ~1 hour
Face setup: 30–40 minutes
Animation: 1–2 hours

Cartoony Monster (curve-based shapes with geometry)

Shape creation: ~15 minutes
Face setup: ~15 minutes
Animation: ~1.5 hours

The goal isn’t to rush — it’s to streamline the technical steps so you can spend almost all of your time animating intuitively on acting and timing.

Core Modules

If you are new to this system, I've created a collapsable Tips Section for you, quickly describing how to sculpt the most important facials.

1) Create Controllers

Build your slider controllers directly in the viewport:

Automatic naming and grouping
Lockable controller groups (e.g. “Lock Frame” for finalized layouts)
Extendable with custom controllers (2-way, 3-way, 4-way)
Presets for mouth, eyes and brows
Additional controllers can be added at any time

2) Shape Linking

Connect existing shape keys to your sliders in a single pass:

Choose your mesh or curve object
Assign each shape to a specific axis and controller type (2W, 3W, 4W…)
Optional bone-pick (e.g. for jaw influence on “Aaa”)
Automatic left/right splitting for selected shapes
Choose which slider controls the R/L fading (can be a dedicated h2W or the X-axis of a 4W controller)
Common use cases: blinks, brows, sneers, lip asymmetry
At the end, the add-on builds all required drivers based on your mapping rules.

3) Object / Bone Mapping

Ideal for tongue rigs, simple tail rigs, or any bone chain controlled by sliders:

Select a bone chain and map it to a 4W controller
Optional additional controller for counter-animation (e.g. tongue tip)
Influence ramp and fine-tuning for gradual motion along the chain
Map any object or bone SRT channel to any slider
Full support for asymmetry

What you get

A lightweight, artist-oriented workflow that replaces dozens of manual rigging steps with a clear, visual mapping process. You stay flexible, controllers stay readable, and animation remains fast and responsive — even for long talking sequences.

You are missing a special mouth shape later in the process? No problem: Sculpt it. Create Controller. Map it. Continue animating!