The downside is the time-consuming setup process. What’s better, you can create new expressions on the fly, if your project suddenly changes direction. With joints in place, properly skinned to the mesh, you can create an almost unlimited variety of expressions. What are the pros and cons of each? I’ve answered this question previously, but let’s break it down again! Facial Setup with Joints Here’s the video! Keep reading after for more info.Ī common question for Maya face rigging is whether to use joints for facial animation, or blendshapes. If you’ve never done it before, be prepared to spend days or weeks (or even months) tweaking!

Making it emote convincingly is especially difficult. Iterate iterate iterate! The YouTube video shows the creation of one expression, but the extended cut shows the creation process for ALL the emotion expressions. Create an entirely new facial expression and repeat the process again. Tweak the weighting based on the new joint position. Adjust the joints based on the new weighting. Pose the character, adjust the weighting. The Maya face rigging process has a LOT of back and forth. So we have to pose our character’s face by moving the joints, and then adjusting the skin weighting based on what we see. The trick is that we need to see the face in motion, to test the skinning. Of course, the default weighting will be terrible, so we’ll have to adjust them significantly. Once our joints are laid out, we attach our character’s face to the joint with geodesic voxel weighting. Instead, we will place joints in clusters, designed to replicate the movement of the facial muscles. Unlike the body, our Maya joints won’t try to mimic actual joints, like an elbow or an ankle. The face is made up of overlapping muscles that move in concert. This is more confusing than joint placement on the body, because there are no obvious joints on the face. This is different from joint placement for the face, where joints are placed along areas of motion on the face. In my previous character setup video, joints are placed on actual joints of the body, like the elbow. My character face modeling tutorials go over this in-depth! Or see the extended cut here. Your character’s face must be topologized properly to work WITH the face joints.

So how do we handle the complexity of all those joints, and the accompanying skin weighting issues it brings?

In fact, you may end up with double or triple the number! Setting up a character’s body is one thing – but Maya face rigging is on a whole other level! It isn’t uncommon to have more joints in the face than in the rest of the body combined.

Maya rigging tutorial torrent