Rigging a character’s body is one thing – setting up the face? That’s a much more difficult challenge! This MAYA 2017 FACE RIGGING EXTENDED CUT TUTORIAL covers the solid foundational topics every character face rigger needs. Topics covered:

• Creation and placement of joints to create proper animation.
• Adding new joints and tweaking the placement of existing joints – even after the skin is bound to the skeleton!
• Synching our topology with our joints for ideal deformation.
• Adjusting topology and anatomy to animate correctly – while the mesh is already attached to the skeleton!
• Animating our joints to create emotion poses – including all the major emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, disgust, fear, and surprise.
• Painting skin weights to ensure proper deformation and animation of our face.
• Iterating on joint placement, topology shape, skin weighting, and animation, to create more appealing face shapes.

This topic is so complicated, so in-depth, that this video is just PART 1 in a multi-part series. The next videos in the series will specifically cover material not shown here, such as phonemes, set-driven-keys, and creating a control panel for animation. The crucial techniques presented here cover the hard work of establishing the initial skeleton and skin weighting – the lion’s share of the work! The very same techniques are built on top of to create mouth shapes for talking – and that whole process will be MUCH easier after watching this video!

This video assumes you’ve already seen the JOINTS and SKINNING video – or are at least familiar with the topics covered there. This tutorial is split into separate chapters based on topic, making review easy.

• 1080P
• H.264 Mpeg4
• 1:25:08 running time
• 2.42 GB file size, split into a whopping 22 files