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