wk_facerig – Fast, intuitive facial animation in Blender

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.

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:

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

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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

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!