What you'll learn

In this Maya tutorial, we'll cover methods for adding topology to our new or pre-existing model to make creating mouth shapes and expressions feasible. For anyone focusing on animation, having a character to work with is important. In a previous course, we went through the process of building a basic character that we could use to practice our animation. The character is meant to show action and emotion through only the movement of the body. While this is great practice for getting the most out of our character's body movements, at some point we'll probably want to start creating facial expressions and even make our character speak. We'll use a variety of tools in Maya like the Split Polygon Tool and the Insert Edge Loops tool to manually add and remove edges and generally reroute the geometry as needed. We'll also add geometry for the interior of the mouth and reassemble the head with the existing body. Software required: Maya 2011.