Week 5 - Facial Rigging

This week:

Please follow lesson 8 of the lynda Rigging tutorials to go over again the skinning process discussed last week.

The above video's :lesson 7 video 4 and lesson 9 on Lynda cover the details of todays demonstration.

There are a number of methods for rigging faces but here we will be looking at blend shapes.

Use Windows > Animation Editors > Shape Editor
Select you model and add a Blend Shape Deformer via Create
Add Targets and edit using the modelling tool kit
Create shapes for one side of the face and then duplicate and flip for the other side
Rename your shapes as you go along
Create in-between shapes for eye lids. Remember that blends happen linearly.

For additional help with the Shape Editor please check the Autodesk Maya Help pages below

Once you have made your shapes they can be animated using the shape editor or by adding a control rig.

Create control objects - Either with a UI made from splines or with spline controllers linked to exsisting rig.
Connect the blend shapes to the controllers using Set Driven Key
You need to select the blend shape deformer node to add it as your driver

Next week we will look at finishing off our rigs and preparing them for animation. Please finialise your blend shapes and create controls for them.

We will continue with our final animations, looking at the stages of animation process, pose to pose animation techinique and the graph editor.

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