Face Rigging in Maya - Part 1

[Music] hi and welcome to this tutorial what we're gonna do over the next few videos is basically take this head model and we're going to rig it we're going to make it fully capable of facial animation and as well as a wide variety of facial expressions just saw this character can show a wide range of emotions now to do this we're going to take we're basically going to take these controls here you know we've got this user interface here all these controls that currently don't do anything they're all set up ready to be used we've also got these controls you know the larger area controls for controlling the head the mouth the eyes etc as well now at the moment these don't do anything to the head because there's nothing on the head it's not got a skeleton in it's not got blend shapes it's no got anything like that but in this tutorial we're not gonna focus really on building the skeleton painting the weights you know doing all the more fundamental things you know traditionally with a rig you would use set driven keys quite a lot to get to drive the facial poses you'd either use blend shapes or you use joints blend shapes you get the nice shapes and everything with joints a little bit more of a task to set up but then everything is driven by set driven keys which then you know can clog up your scene and increase the file size instead what they're going to do is we're compact going to combine the two approaches we're going to use blend shapes which will give us our main face shapes you know give us the nice forms which we need and we're also going to use joints and the joints will then help to adding another layer of animation on top to just pull and push the main areas of the shape of the face around so basically to give you maximum flex ability so you'll you know you'll see as we go on just how both can work together quite nicely now I mentioned set driven keys earlier and what with this rig we're not gonna use set driven keys at all what we're going to use instead are Mayer's utility notes now you may have seen these if you've been looking in the hypershade or floating around the node editor and you probably just ignored them like I did for many years you know they looked a bit complicated they were probably only useful for shaders anyway weren't they and that's why I always thought but recently I've come to realize that they are very useful for rigging not only that but there can be a lot easier to set up there are a lot more versatile and you know you can get a lot more out of them if you're if you're clever with how you have you use them but anyway you'll see all this as we get through the tutorial I think I've waffled on quite enough now so yes we've got ahead we've got all our controls here and these are just your standard NURBS controls for various parts of the face which we're going to wire up obviously we've got things for the mouth the nose and some extras here for sticky lips and other things like that so as I mentioned we're going to use a combination of blend shapes and joints so the first thing we're going to do is generate the blunt shapes now again like I mentioned when I'm not going to go through the process of generating all the blend shapes so I've already gone through and generous started working on these and as you can see I've started working on certain shapes now we have a frown we have a smile we have a wide mouth now those three in particular are quite important if you look we have the mouth going out to the side well if you focus on the corner of the mouth because what this rig will essentially do is allow you to pick the corner of the mouth and to pull it around to get these various shapes so that's why we need these three main shapes first you imagine we the mouse claws we pick the corner of mouth here we pull the control out to the side and it will achieve this blend shape the same with this we push push it up and it will go to this one and the same with the frown now the beauty of this is we can use won't control as you move it up and down or around it'll blend between the three in effect pulling the corner of the mouth around so there those are the first three that's just a variation of the smile in fact that's the smile I'm going to use as opposed to this wide smile here this is just an extra sort of corrective shape which you can use as a smile gets wider just in case you know the shapes not exactly what you want so let's just hide that for now that's just confusing things so when you're generating your blend shapes it's easier to use have symmetry enabled because you want both sides to be the same and don't be afraid to use Maya's new sculpting tools while I say new relatively new sculpting tools they're really handy for pulling big shapes around now with the smile and the frown don't be tempted to pull the corner of the mouth out to the side and up you've got the wide shape here which is going to give you the movement out to the side all you want with the smile and the frown is the up and down shape the width will come from this blend shape here so let's have a quick look at some of the others so we've got our lower lids closed at upper lids closed we've also got a half way variation now this is so now blend shapes will only move from point A to point B so these eyelid vertices here will move directly up what we do is add a mid point and that will force them to almost look like they're moving around the eyeball rather than straight up that will stop this from intersecting with the eye we've also then got some other basic shapes we've got a pucker we've got one con Earl shape we've got sort of a gritting teeth shape so all the lips pull back so the teeth can be bad we've got the cheeks puffed out you know you could you can go on and add as many as you like you if you've got one here where the lips are just clamped closed for those M sounds so we have our basic shapes and as I said you can add in as many more as you want but obviously these are affecting the whole mouth or the whole eye what you want to do now is split these into two and rather than going and just having to rebuild beads we can take these men blend shapes and we can create something which will pretty much automatically generate either the left or the right side for us so let's just take our main head I'm going to duplicate that let's move that over there and we'll call that head right PS bs4 blend shape left bs so we have our two heads here so I'm going to select all the heads select the right one and we go to let's just bring that back Oh deform blend check I'm going to open that up now this is just a temporary blend shape so it doesn't really matter so for now I'm just going to call right side bs apply node east like that and we're going to select the next one left side blend shape so we now have two blend shape nodes with these in and you can see we move those like so and they're working so let's just put one on it doesn't really really matter which so we know that they're activated now we're going to do is we are going to go to deform paint weights blend shape as you can see the radical will bring up the blend shape node plus all the blend shapes underneath so you can define different ways free blend each blend shape or an overall one for the blend shape nerd what you could do then is go in and paint the weights so that the so this is the right side so we want this side to have the blend shape on so this side has zero on it in fact what I'll do is I'll demonstrate that now so let's just set value to zero and as I paint that you can see let's just use a harder brush you can see that it's removing the influence from here now using the paint in the weights it can be a bit tricky so there is a quicker way of doing it I'm going to do is just let's just close that down let's go to the front view let's just go back to this panel just move this over and we're just gonna select the left-hand side like so we're not selecting the vertices in the middle we're just selecting the left-hand side then go to window general editors component editor so I'll just bring this over here so you can see it it's already selected here but you have your blend shape deformers so what we can do is try and find our master control here right side blend shape and we're just going to scrub that down so we've got it all selected type 0 and enter and then if I move that down so all those rather than painting them I've just gone in and set the values manually so now we can go in and select the central ones like so just make sure that's it now we don't want these to be set 0 because we want them to be influenced by the blend shapes but then we don't want them set to want because if if the right side is set to 1 so we've got the mouth open like this and the middle vertices are influenced and the left side is set to want then the middle vertices are going to be influenced by a value of 2 because it's going to be influenced by both sides so instead we want the middle vertices to be influenced half by each side so when the birth combined you get a value of 1 in the middle so you're not over influencing so go over to right vs again set that to 0.5 so that's now influenced by half so if I open the blend shapes here close that down if you notice we can edit these okay sometimes Maya does this with blend shapes you know it's some are working and some are all we need to do is save the scene out and load you back in but I'll do that so it sort of next so now we can repeat the process on this side so select the right side of the heads vertices so mad so this is the heads right side not your right side yeah if you're understand windows general editors component editor go over to the end left signed side blend shapes we want it to affect affect the whole blend shape go down to the bottom so that's a zero and now we're selecting the middle one because we want it so influenced by half move this back up Oh set 0.5 and there we go just set all those a zero so you can see there for that particular blend shape so now we have just the right side of that shape there and just the left side there and that will work for all of them so at this stage you could keep this in a scene with all the blank shapes because basically well let's just see if we can get around that's it basically these are still tied to this so rather than going through all this again you could save this scene out and then if you have to edit this blend shape later you notice it's being updated here because it's still all connected so we could change this mouth you know and then it'll update here but when you're happy with these shapes all you do is you sort of start from work your way through and go frown one so like to duplicate those so we bake that in and there we've got our left and right blend shapes we named them correctly and then we can go in and we can say do those two duplicate you know and so on and so on so you're baking in those shapes and you're allowing for your your work to be editable should you have to go through this again and tweak the blend shapes later once you're playing around with them those that's just what I'm gonna do is I'm going to temporarily save the file out bring it back in just so all the blend ships are working so I'll just do that in there okay so I've save a scene out and loaded it back in like I say that's it a bit of a bug in Maya with the blend shapes but now they're all working so we have our left and right eyelids we have the pucker you know and so on just go through them all just test them all but then you just duplicate these to bait them out and you've got all your main blend shapes then so you could just go through and generate as many of these that you need you could even divide them into smaller sections of the mouth if you needed to so for example the lips you know remember this was gritting his teeth we could maybe say oh well we just want the middle and then the side and then they it can be separate controls for pulling the mouth mouthed around so there's a lot you can do with this sort of technique but I think for this first video we're gonna call it a day and we'll just pick up in the next video yeah where we start to generate our main blend shapes and you know discussing building the skeleton so yeah I'll leave this here and I'll see you in the next video

Channel: antCGi

Views: 93,133

Keywords: maya, autodesk, facerig, face, rig, rigging, tutorial, nodes, animation, utilitynodes, blendshapes, joints, skeleton, maya rigging tutorial, maya rigging, face rigging

Id: K9qT9kmRCAg

Length: 16min 19sec (979 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 08 2019