Maya Facial Rigging Fundamentals
Learn how to create a flexible and contained facial animation rig that allows animators to create meaningful facial poses.
What you'll learn
Facial rigging is an essential skill for any aspiring 3d artist, and the ability to create a flexible and contained rig helps animators further down the pipeline.
In this course, Maya Facial Rigging Fundamentals, you’ll learn an efficient facial rigging process from start to finish.
First, you'll assess what the animator needs to have, which is a facial rig that is flexible and still restricted to only create meaningful facial-poses.
Next, you'll learn how to get there, starting with the eyebrows, using joints on one side and blend shapes on the other, learning about the pros and cons of both methods.
Moving forward, you'll use a combination of both those techniques for special facial-rigging features such as fleshy eyes, as well as look at controls for the eyeballs. Finally, all those mechanics will be bound to the user controls shown at the beginning.
By the end of this course, you'll have the skills you need to rig the face of your own characters.
Software required: Maya.
Table of contents
- Create a Template for a Slider-control 5m
- Setup Transformation Limitations for the Slider-control 7m
- Create a Template for a Plane-control 5m
- Using the Templates for Creating the Eyebrow-controls 7m
- Connecting the Blend Shapes to the Controls 7m
- Connecting the Joints to the Controls 7m
- More Pros and Cons of Joints and Blend Shapes 2m
- Deciding Between Joints or Blend Shapes 5m
- Placing Joints for the Mouth 5m
- Adding Joints as Deformers and Skinning the Jaw 5m
- Smoothing out the Jaw-weighting 3m
- Assigning Fully Weighted Areas of Skin to Lip Joints 3m
- Smoothing Out the Lip-weighting 6m
- Test Skinning by Posing Rough Expressions 4m
- Creating Mouth Controls and Connecting the Lip Corner Up/Down Channel to Joints 7m
- Creating Deformation for Mouth Wide/Narrow Channel 3m
- Creating Deformation for Jaw Channels 4m
- Creating Deformation for the Lip Up/Down Channels 5m
- Creating Deformation for Mouth Up/Down and Mirroring Lip Corner Channels 1m
- Setting up a UI-camera and Final Skin Weight Tweaks Based on Channel Deformations 6m
- Editing Driven Key Curves to Correct Channel-combinations 6m
- Continuing to Edit Driven Key Curves to Correct Channel-combinations 4m
- Creating Basic Emotions with Mouth Controls 3m
- Creating Corrective Blendshapes for Mouth Narrow Channel 5m
- Connecting Corrective Blendshapes to Controls 4m
- Mirror Corrective Blendshapes and Create Combination Correctives 4m
- Correctives to Make the OOO and UUU Phonemes Work 4m
- Finishing and Testing the Mouth Rig 2m
- Creating Controls for the Eye-region and Setting up the Cheek Controls 2m
- Creating the Eyelid Deformation by Using in-between Blend Shapes 5m
- Creating the Eyelid Deformation on the Right Side 4m
- Editing the Head-joint 5m
- Creating the Controls for the Eyes 5m
- Connecting the Eye-controls by Using an Aim-constraint 6m
- Creating a Fleshy Eye Setup 7m
- Final Words 1m
About the author
Carla Heinzel is a professor of technical art at the German University of Applied Sciences Darmstadt, where she teaches 3D art for games and animated movies. She began her career studying animation at a German film academy and later worked for movies, such as 2012, The Immortals, and Cloud Atlas. Being a 3D artist she has experience in almost every department of a 3D production, from modeling to simulation, but her focus was always character rigging. After some years working for the film industr... more