What you'll learn

When focusing on animation, having a character to work with is important. In a previous course, we covered the process of building a basic bipedal character that we could use to practice our animation. The character can work well as we attempt 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 can do this by adding geometry to define the mouth of our character. In this course, we'll cover methods for adding topology to our existing model to make creating mouth shapes and expressions feasible. We'll use a variety of tools in 3ds Max 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 make sure the head is reassembled with the existing body. Software required: 3ds Max 2010.