D4mations.com

MAYA 2017 CHARACTER FACE RIGGING TUTORIAL – BASIC JOINTS AND SKINNING

https://i.ytimg.com/vi/L8DZRsJU16U/hqdefault.jpg



This MAYA 2017 FACE RIGGING BASICS TUTORIAL covers the solid foundational topics every character face rigger needs. Topics covered:
Creation and placement of joints to create proper animation.
Synching our topology with our joints for ideal deformation.
Animating our joints to create emotion poses.
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 my JOINTS and SKINNING video – or are at least familiar with the topics covered there.

source

d4mer

, ,
, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

39 responses to “MAYA 2017 CHARACTER FACE RIGGING TUTORIAL – BASIC JOINTS AND SKINNING”

  2. Good day!! I love how the way you teach others. The way you speak, it makes more sense. I learned a lot on your tutorials. I'm watching your tutorials since im studying animations. Thank you so much James Taylor. Keep up your good work.

  7. Thanks a bunch for this, James! 😀 Your videos and extended editions are incredibly helpful to me. I'm fairly recent to modeling and rigging (less than a year of experience), but I've been able to stand on the shoulders of giants and already learn a great workflow and create great things (living and otherwise!) by using your videos and getting used to how a professional works. 🙂

  10. This is slightly off topic, and I don't know if you have any experience with this but; I'm importing .obj files into Maya 2015, but they're always missing random faces… This doesn't happen when I open them in other 3d programs, only when I open them in Maya. And the faces aren't inverted or hidden; they're just gone, as if they were deleted.
    Normally it's an easy fix (just remodel and fill in the holes) but sometimes it's a little more difficult when a rifle turns into just a floating trigger and clip, or a character suddenly has no face. Any ideas on how to prevent this?

  11. Great video. But is there a way to set driven key a controller to make the joints align to the timeline keyed poses? I've been trying but maya doesn't seem to register the keys as movements and I don't want to set driven key one bone and one attribute at a time.

  13. If you have the experience, would you be willing to make a tutorial on how to set up IK handles at some point? It would be super helpful for game development, and I really just can't figure out how I'd make it work with helper joints (or if it's even possible).

  14. This is extremely helpful, thanks so much! Your tutorials are easy to understand and are perfect for beginners. I hope this isn't demanding for me to ask but, would you consider making a tutorial explaining muscles in the near future?

  16. Hello, James, I just stumbled across this video tutorial and I must say this is the MOST IMPRESSIVE tutorial I have ever seen for facial animation. I was going to do this for my fighting game characters, but I would have to do this for ALL of my characters… I am going to enjoy trying this out 🙂

  28. Great tutorial! I can't thank you enough for sharing this. I've been looking for a good (recent) source of information on facial rigging in Maya for a while now. I've been able to find loads of great demo reels that seem to be doing more than what you can easily find on the internet and it would be great to see more content on this subject.

    In particular I'd love to see a rig setup for this. I've received fully weighted characters with bone based facial setups before but never understood how to make the bone based facial setups pose naturally….controlling all of those bones can be unwieldy!

    Have you seen the faceware rigs?

    http://facewaretech.com/learn/training-assets/

    I downloaded "victor" the bald guy on the end with blue eyes. It's a fully boned based and incredibly complex, I cant figure out how to reverse engineer it. Learning assets and knowledge for this kind of thing seem to be locked up with many of the other film industry secrets.

    From what I can gather it seems like there are a set of joints that are skinned to the mesh which then have control joints driving the skin joints. There's a group in there called "inverse matrix" that seems to have a bunch of rivets and joints inside it that I don't understand. It also seems like the control joints also have poses stored in side of a range of blendshapes? after that my head exploded and I gave up on understanding bone based facial rigs. I didn't think it was possible to create a blendshape on a joint.

    The rig it's self looks great. When you open the jaw the other joints around the mouth move with the movement of the jaw creating some nice automotion but I couldn't begin to break it all down without some guidance.

    Could it be possible that once you have built the skin joints you could create a new set of control joints that drive the skin joints via constraints that have corrective animation blendshapes applied allowing for some cool automotion without having to rely on mesh based blend shapes? This is all very confusing for me as I normally don't do character based CG work and it would be great to see some detailed workflows to make joint based rigging more controllable and accessible.

    Anyway great tutorial. Liked and subscribed. Keep up the good work.

  38. Awesome tutorial I've been waiting for this!! Quick question what do you feel are the differences between a joint based facial rig setup vs a blendshape one? And what situations should I prefer one setup over the other?

    Super helpful stuff as usual James! Thanks for these tutorials they are a tremendous resource.

  39. all tuto nice and easy, it mean you open mind of the student easy , new user when see these tuto they think Maya is easy………in fact compere to c4d and other software hard but it's good place to start . the deffecult part is ik/fk stretch driver and driven , is it possible to make tuto. thanks James taylor

Leave a Reply