3D Tips - Maya Facial Rigging

what's up everyone and welcome back to another 3d tips character facial rigging in maya so today i want to talk about how to rig a face in maya we talked about in our previous lesson how to rig an entire body but today i want to talk how to rig the face because this is where all the cool stuff happen if you want to have some crazy looking okay i'm going too far let's rig the face in 3d shall we all right so here is our 3d model okay we got the body rig done and now what we want to do is to rig the face we got advanced skeleton loaded up it's right here and let's now talk about how to approach the rigging of this space now we're gonna select the geometry i like to you know have this on the side here because plenty of times i'm going to just view the selected here makes it easier for me to select uh what i want to select okay now first thing i need to select all the geometry that is going to be used as a as a mask here so it's pretty much what we would call the region of you know of where the face rig is going to happen so those are the pretty much i'm going to select also a couple of here that are under the neck because i think i need these faces as well here just to be sure okay and now behind the neck i don't need this i just need the face like that yeah that's pretty much what i want i'm gonna hit the um mask here and this is going to take into account that those are the faces that i want to use now from there i want to select the object itself the base itself model and then i'm just going to remove under show nurbs curves so that i don't select any of those inadvertently i'm going to select all of the elements that are making the head and it's telling me there is no skin cluster found on the model left eye that's fine just create a new skin cluster i'm fine with that and then we're going select our uh left eye and then we're gonna select our right eye okay uh and we're going to actually i selected the wrong one this is going to be our um left eye and this is going to be our right eye okay and then what do we have we have the upper teeth so i'm just gonna hit ctrl h to select the upper teeth and then the lower teeth and the tongue and then the eyebrows we select the eyebrows and then we select the eyelashes and if there are anything extra in terms of model like if you have sunglasses or something like that then you can select that under extras um okay now that we've selected all of that if your model is not symmetrical click non-symmetrical minus symmetrical so that's fine and we're going to start with the first one so the first fit options because here there are a bunch of options that we need to go through in order to make sure that the facial rig is rigged the way it's supposed to so first thing is selecting the eyeball so you select the eyeball it says it's going to replace the eyeball from your body setup that's fine we need to bring the eyeball roughly into position like so then we're gonna work on selecting the uh geometry so i'm gonna isolate the selected and we're gonna select the edge loop which is this one here for me that is making the outer eyelid once this gets done it's going to have actually if i show you nurbs curves and nurbs surfaces it's creating some controllers for you that are actually outlining what you've selected now i'm not gonna you know look at those because they're in my way i just want to isolate here and select the corresponding edge loops for me smash faster that way so this is my eyelid main main eyelid and then we have the eyelid inner which is generally once you've modeled your 3d face it's the geometry that's remaining here the very edge this one here is the edge loop that's for the eyelid inner and then what is the other thing that we have here we have the lip outer so once we're done with this we have the lip outer which is for me in this case this one this is the lip outer i'm going to select that i always look to have the proper edge look selected so you should do that as well then i have my lip main and see in this case it's not going all the way through because of how the model is modeled but i'm gonna help here in the selection same thing on the other side okay just checking that my selection is identical it is and i'm gonna say lip main and now because of the nature of the model here oh you see there is seems to be a mistake because this should be going all the way through okay so if this happens you can unselect it will delete delete what you've selected and what you've done and we can do it again check what happened actually i did select everything so everything should be fine i'm gonna go back to lip main again to recreate this yeah this is what should happen and then for the lip inner because of the nature of the model we can't really select easily so there is a button here that says assist me it says no so it has a problem now because it created okay so let's let's do this again let's remove the lip outer and delete everything that's extra and let's go at this again so this is the lip main okay and let's select the lip outer like this so now once we've selected both of these we can say assist and what's going to happen is it's going to pull this out for you so that the selection is much easier and i'm gonna select this edge here again i'm having a bit of trouble with the selection here so i'm gonna zoom in into the model and make sure that my selection is done right okay now i have a full edge loop here inside and i'm going to just say lip inner should close the lips once it's done there we go okay now let's select the eyebrows so we have the eyebrows here and we're going to select the corresponding vertices um here so for example this vertex is the albra eyebrow inner this vertex here is the eyebrow outer and this vertex here is the eyebrow center have some optional you know additional options if your eyebrows are more complicated but i'm not just not gonna go through those right now now i'm gonna select the forehead so this is the location of my forehead actually make it a bit wider and just click forehead three vertices are required for that as a minimum the drop pivot so the pivot here should be around here it's where your jaw is pivoting as the name suggests and then we're selecting the vertex here for the draw corner and another vertex here for the jaw itself this is where it's going to say this will replace the jaw from the body setup which is fine i don't need it anymore and then the vertex for the throat and then we have the cheeks so the cheeks for this character around somewhere let's say around here and then we have the cheek bone which is around here the cheek razor is around here smile bulging is when where you want your geometry to start deforming when the smile kicks in the frown bulge is when you're frowning then we need to select the nose here's the nose and then we select the nose under under and then we select the vertex for the nose corner optional controls for the nose if you want more control it's fine for now i don't need it the tongue well the tongue itself yeah i want to select it now because i think it's very important when the character is talking you have some more option it's going to create a bunch of controls for you here another option that is very important i feel is for the eyes to set up the pupil and the iris so the iris here is the black part of your eye sorry the the pupil is the black part and then we have the iris which is the colored part like this so we have control for that some additional up mid low options that we don't need for now and then um there's an additional smile line option and that's only used if your character is very complex in its geometry and you need to work a bit more on that so this is it this is where we're we're done and this is where generally you would need to save before you continue so don't forget to save your progress here okay and then now what we're going to do is we're going to actually go on under the build option and say build but you have two options build manually which we don't want now this is something to be used if there is a problem somewhere what we want now is to build the advanced face skeleton and once we click on build advanced phase skeleton it's going to go through a bunch of scripts that are making controls and creating some additional skin influences and whatnot in order to rig the base it's also creating a custom gui for you and controls on the face so why do we have that well because some animators prefer to animate manually directly using the controls on the face and selecting them there and you have some animators that just like to animate using a gui so that way you know you have both covered and everyone's happy okay so advanced skeleton it's working its magic and it's nearly done there we go it's finished okay and once you have you know your rig that it's that is built and what you want to do is you want to check it out so again the eyes are moving you can select the controls here on the gui so you know check if everything's going where it's supposed to what you get also is a set of phone names made for you so if your that character needs to talk the phone names will be made as well which is pretty cool and you have a couple of shapes that are already pre-made like for example happy you know angry yeah sad sad doesn't look that good but surprised so i love a big surprise up there right okay fear disgust and so on but the point is that you know you you've got something that's already working and you can customize it and modify it further if you want you can import this facial rig in any other scene and it will work you know you don't need to have advanced skeleton installed you can share it along down your production pipeline and everything will work as it's supposed to and that's it for the 3d tips on facial rigging with advanced skeleton in maya i hope you liked this tutorial and that it gave you a good insight into what's necessary to create a good facial rig don't forget to ask any questions you might have down in the comments below and one more important thing and this is the most important one is to like our video and please subscribe to our channel it's gonna help us a lot so smash the like button and hit that bell icon to get notified when the next 3d tips comes online until then adios you

Channel: KINOMENTOR

Views: 5,389

Keywords: maya, 3dtips, rigging, advanced skeleton, kinomentor, 3d, animation, 3danimation

Id: xJ-6ePODLjU

Length: 16min 36sec (996 seconds)

Published: Mon May 10 2021