I'm James Taylor, back with another character setup video. This time we're talking about creating joints and skinning the character's face. Now face setup is an extremely complicated topic, so this video is just covering the basics of bone layout and initial skinning. I'll start off by creating a duplicate of my character's head, I just hid it on its own layer here. Then we'll start the joint creation process. So I'll just use my CREATE JOINT TOOL and then I'm going to place a joint at the base of the neck. This is going to be my root, and I'll duplicate that joint - CTRL+D - to create a bone for the head, and a bone for the jaw. The head bone sits right where the jaw and the skull meet. The jaw joint sits a little bit in front of it. And you'll see as I'm working, I'm constantly naming my new joints. Next I want to tackle creating joints around the mouth. Instead of creating new joints, I just duplicate the joints that I have. That will be a little bit easier. I'll adjust the radius in the CHANNEL BOX to make them a little bit smaller, because we're going to need to place a lot of these on the face, and having a smaller radius will make it easier to work with. Now I'll place these in a ring that roughly follow the topology of the laugh line laugh line on the face here. Now, I'll name them the same as I did in the body video, I'll start them with L_ and then I'll name them based on the feature that they're going to control. So in this case, laugh line, and then on name them based on the position, and finally I put them on their own layer and assign of color to that layer.This is going to make it easier to keep track of them. And then I'll repeat this process: I'll duplicate one of my joints. This time I put it on its own layer to begin with, and I'll choose a different color for it. that'll just make it easier to keep track of all these duplicates. Once I've chosen a color, I'll duplicate these, they're going to sit between the laugh line and the lips and I'm going to place them near the edge rings that I have surrounding the mouth. These joints will control the area that sits between the laugh line and the lips. Up next are the lips themselves. I'll just duplicate a joint, decrease the joint radius again, and I'll put it on its own lips layer with its own individual color and I'll duplicate that so that I have a ring of joints sitting in the middle of the lips, encircling encircling them like so. I'll take a moment here to name all of my joints. Joints that sit on the center line of the face get a C_ in the front instead of an L_ or an R_ . And it really doesn't matter what naming scheme you choose. You just want to make sure that the groups of bones are named appropriately based on the feature of the face, and then are given a suffix that kind of locates them around that feature. What I name them is not as important, what is important is that you choose a scheme that when you're using the PAINT SKIN WEIGHTS TOOL and the COMPONENT EDITOR later it'll make things easy for you to understand Next I'll create a series of bones that will control the cheeks. So once again I'll start by duplicating an existing joint, and after I duplicate that joint, I will name it appropriately and then place it on its own layer with its own color. This will make it much easier to keep track of these groups of joints that we're going to have. Now I'll resize these joints, because they're going to have a little bit of a bigger influence on the face. So I'll make the radius a little bit bigger, and then I'll duplicate them and follow along the shape of the cheekbone and I'm basically sitting these directly on the edge intersections on the characters face. The upper three will control the shape of the cheekbone, the lower two will control the shape of the cheek as the jaw opens and closes. Next - the area around the eyes. The eyes are an area that are fairly dense with joints. I'll duplicate a joint with a smaller radius and position a ring of joints around the eye in a concentric fashion. This outer set of joints will allow us to create squinting motions, and to adjust the opening and closing of the eyes. And you'll note that I'm placing a joint each on the corner. After that I do the exact same thing on the inside lid of the eye, sitting these on those edges directly. this will allow me to control the shape of the eyelid, and again I'm taking pains to name every joint as I create it. Next is the brow region. I'll duplicate a relatively large joint, I'll put it on its own layer, and I'll place these on the verts that sit directly above the brow. We're going to have three of these, and then I'll place one in the center. Again centerline joints get a C_ in front of them I'll place another centerline joint on the bridge of the nose, and the third one will sit on the bulb of the nose. And since I'm in the region, I'll add another joint that will sit on the nostril itself that will control the flaring of the nostril. and then I'll turn my attention back to the forehead. I'll create another series of joints sitting in the upper forehead and they roughly correspond to the rows that I have in that upper forehead area. Now because we need to create joints in our orthographic views, we've been placing them in our front view camera up to this point. When I zoom out I can see that the joints are not sitting on the face, they're sitting in the middle of the head. obviously I have to move them forward, so that they correspond to the part of the anatomy that the joint was created to move. To do this I'm using my MOVE TOOL in concert with my point snap functionality - so i'm holding down the V key, and I'm moving each joint forward to the corresponding vertex that it sits nearest to. You'll see that when I'm dragging these joints forward I'm dragging them solely using the z-axis arrow. So you can see that I'm pulling on the z-axis - what would be the blue vector - and that means that they're only going to move in the one direction, they're only going to move forward in space. And I just need to make sure that when i'm dragging them forward, I'm placing my mouse cursor close enough to the point, for example on the lips, so that when they snap forward, they are in the right location. Once I snap them forward then I can look at them in the side view and in the perspective view and just fine-tune the positioning to make sure that every joint is where it's supposed to be. you'll see that for the finer details, features on the face like the lips and the eye area, I spend a lot of time zoomed-in in both the perspective view and side view to ensure that I'm getting optimal placement of these joints. Our end result will cover half of the character's face with joints. Note that there are indeed a lot of joints. We want to take advantage of Maya's MIRROR JOINT feature so that we don't have to create all of them for the opposite side. So i'm going to create a duplicate joint, and I can duplicate any of the joints from the face, and I'll just put that joint somewhere in the inside recesses of the cheekbone, so it's sitting inside the face, and I will parent all of the joints sitting on the left side of the face to this helper joint. So i just select them and shift-click that helper join and hit p. I parent them and once that's done I'll select that helper joint and then select my head joint and parent it. Now I've got this nice joint chain that will allow me to use my MIRROR JOINTS TOOL. It's also important to note that those centerline face joints are not parented not a mirror joints i'll select that helper joint go to my rigging drop-down go to skeleton and go to the options mirror joint on a search for El underscore and replace with our underscore and that will effectively mirror all the joints on the opposite side and now it looks like we're ready to start the skinning process however before we do there's one more thing we need to take care of once we're done with our Anatomy tweaks will make our joint visible again and then select our mesh and do an edit delete by type history and this is all been building up to adding a mesh smooth to our mesh so i'm going to select the mesh and hit one to go to understand move mode and then shift right click and just do the actual mesh smooth and one subdivision should be enough if we add more our mesh is probably going to be too dense to allow for easy skin waiting now the reason that we subdivided at all is because a denser mesh is going to animate a little bit better with all these joint influences that we've created when i'm finally satisfied with the mesh then I'll begin the skinning process so i'll select all of my joints and shift-click on the head and go to my reading drop down and then the skin menu and we're going to the options of buying skin and I want to make sure that my method except geodesic voxel and I can pretty much leave everything else the same as is once the head is skinned I'll turn on my pink skin weeks tool and check my waiting and we'll see areas like the cheek have waiting but there's still an awful lot of joints that have no influence on the head at all and what's happening is we're still getting outside influence from a few of the joints like the jaw joint and the back of the head joint and actually unfortunately the only way to fix this is to start painting things manually so we're going to paint our skin weights much in the same way that we did in the previous skinning and waiting video i want to make sure my brushes set to add i'll choose a low opacity and then I'll just right click on my influences and start adding influences the jaw is a good place to start I'll start adding waiting and you'll see that the waiting is relatively hard all along the bottom of the jaw bone then i can select the head and the head joint is going to fill up most of the waiting on the head so pretty much anything that's not the face or the neck is going to be waited to that head joint and then the neck will start very hot at the bottom and it will blend between the jaw in the head as we go up you'll see here this is also where i first used by mirror skin weight stool so I paint the head neck and jaw and then on mirror over once it looks like it's all filled in then I can start painting on my primary influences which are the bones of the face themselves take note that i'm also rotating the jaw around in order to test the skin waiting a lot of our paint skin weights process involves moving joints around so that we can see whether or not are waiting is working well here when I rotate the head I'll see that all of the joints of the head move except for the face when I parents all of my face joints back to the head now when I rotate to get a good defamation that's pretty predictable I can unpaired those I'm just testing waiting at this point so I'll start right clicking and selecting influence to view the influence that each joint is having on the face and I'm just looking to see that it's roughly affecting the verts in the area around each joy and now I'll start blocking out the influences that I want to use so i'll select each joint and i'll use my ad influence with a low opacity and what I'll do is I'll just make sure that all of the verts directly surrounding each joint are relatively heavily weighted to the joint that they correspond to so i end up with hot spots where there is a hot light waiting in the center and then it fades off around it and I want to do this for each face joint once i have everything completely blocked in then I can worry about actually going in and testing my skin waiting now the lip joints where I'm going to really start to focus first i'll make sure that each verte on the lips is waited almost entirely to the corresponding joint and then i can switch back and forth between each of these influences and by holding down the shift key i can smooth influences between the joints the I region is another area that has the same challenges there's a lot of joints in a lot of birth so i'll select each joint individually and I'll heavily wait diverse around it to that joy only once all of the verse have been 100% whey to the joint then when i go back and start selecting other joints and blending between them when I'm satisfied with the I region then moves on to the prowl joints that are surrounding the I region and will see that these are generally a little bit more correct simply because the joints are spread out more and the verts in each region can be assigned a little bit more precisely by maya ok now it's time to start testing my waiting and to do that we basically have to start moving the characters face around so I'm going to turn on my time and my reign sliders going to make sure that auto key frame is turned on and i'm going to start creating poses that allow me to test the waiting and the character skin this is an iterative process we're going to create multiple poses for the same it will toggle back and forth between them testing the waiting at each step for brevity's sake we're just going to tackle the angry face in this video if you want to see the other phases you can check out the extended cut so i'll start by blocking things out by grabbing the outside corner of the mouth joints and just pulling those out and then I'll grab my individual lift joints and pull those up and out so that were revealing the teeth and we have to remember to preserve the volume of our muscle shape so as the mouth opens as a little back and away from the teeth we lose mass so I'm pushing them back into the teeth to indicate that kind of stretching once I blocked out the major movement with the lips then I'll start working on the joints that surround them out so again I'll pull them out word and I'll also pull them back so they're moving into the head and that will indicate that we're losing volume as you muscles are stretching and pulling against the skull the joints that run along the last line are going to be especially important here so I'm pushing the joints of the mouth up but the ones that sit on the last line that yellow ones are on the outside edges I'm not pulling those back as much and this allows me to get a nice overlap like we see right there it starts to really highlight that laughs for this will be a big characteristic of creating kind of smearing angry face right now our face doesn't look angry so much as it does uncomfortable so we need to start exaggerating features to really sell the emotion that we're trying to create this usually means taking joints and pushing them further and further in the direction that we've already started to go in so with the lips I'm pulling those back further and I'm pushing them out farther so that that's near for the lips is exaggerated beyond what it was this will help us create more not necessarily believable ocean but an emotion that actually reads stepping back to evaluate suppose I can see that the upper lid isn't quite right and so I'll pull some of the outer corner joints back even further and especially the outside of the lips needs to come back to create more that sense attention and to remove some of that extra volume and let's keep in mind the reason that we're creating these faces we're still testing out the skin waiting our character this particular post stresses the cheek a lot more so I'll adjust the waiting in those areas and the first thing that I look for is uneven blending now that i'm using the joints in the cheek a lot more need to make sure that they blend smoothly into the joints of the face so the last line and in your mouth area we need to make sure that all of those are blending smoothly otherwise we're going to get big gaps like we see there that'll cause problems we deform disposed also put a lot of stress onto the lips so i'll adjust my lip joint and I'll evaluate to see are the lips moving in sync with the joints and in this case it looks like i'm not getting enough movement in the upper mounts expected teeth to be buried a little bit more based on the extreme pose of the joints so after go in and add skin waiting so the diverse follow the extreme movement of the joints a lot more closely while I'm painting skin weights I'm evaluating it to see our my birth moving as on painting awaiting and ideally the vert should be moving in the direction that I expect them to be moving in this case i would expect the lips to move up and how if as on painting skin waiting they do not move in that direction and I know that whatever waiting on painting is probably not what I need to be doing in this case because the joints around the mouth moving so extremely i can add some of the outside lip waiting to those joints that will help create more extreme movement and pull them out back a little bit more the way that i'm expected so again this is an iterative process every time we make a new pose we're going to end up checking each set of joints to make sure that the defamation that we're getting is working the way we expected to ok so the pose is getting better but it still looks a lot more like discomfort as a post anger that's because we're only adjusting the joints of the mouth time to start adding some I've move it into this remove the upper cheeks upwards into the eye area this will add a little bit of a winking effect and then I can start work on the eyes themselves the outermost row of the lower eyes remove those up a little bit as well that'll help with that squint effect and mana can grab the actual eyelid Joyce on the bottom eyelid and move those upwards as well I'll grab those and I'll move them up to create that squint effect i also want to look at them in a slide camera to make sure that they're actually covering the eyeball itself and then I'll move that row under the eyelid as well and this is going to create the compression effect that will make the face start to look like it's clinking scrub back and forth to test opposed and by looking at the topology I can see them getting the good sense of compression in the face it feels like the muscles are squishing up but at the same time keeping a consistent amount of mass since that's working well I can start with the browser so i'll begin with the bottom row and i'll just move these down all about the same amount maybe a little bit more in the center and then the second row high up on the forehead on the nose down as well it'll get a v-shape in both cases so we're going to pull the face down a lot more in the center family will toward the outside edges the role of joint sitting between the brown the eyelids is gonna be pretty important for helping to create the compression that will expect to see when the brows pulled down in an angry shape the joints to control the upper eyelid will also come down like and select all those at once and then move them down and forward in the side view and the more I narrow the i angry or it's going to seem we do want to try and create as extreme opposed as possible the goal is to really push the limits of our mesh and our joints skipping ahead will see that the eye area is much more compressed now and I want to feel happy with the shape of it then i'll switch over and start painting skin way when I wait the eyebrow area i want that waiting to be generally pretty soft so I'll hold down the shift key and smooth the weight in the region around the eyebrow joint and you'll see that the influence for each one of those eyebrows joints extends pretty far around the joint itself and that includes going into the upper eyelid area the upper eyelid area is also going to be problematic as will see that a lot of the verts in that area aren't waited to the corresponding joints so this is one of those areas where Maya simply isn't able to correctly place these joints and we're going to have to do a lot of manual correction fortunately the waiting in eyelid area is fairly straightforward we want to wait divert around each bone pretty much one hundred percent to the bone that their closest to and then at the edges on the road verts between joints we can just hold down the shift key to smooth waiting and in that way we'll get a nice defamation the eyelids that allow us to open and close the eyes pretty easily now the same way that i smooth the waiting on the joint for the eyebrow i'll be smoothing the weighting of the joints around the eyes so in between the brows and at the bridge of the nose of the adjusting waiting there and especially the joints of the upper cheek going to tweak the influences there as well as the eyebrow influences to make sure that we're getting enough flexibility when those joints move so we see this is a really iterative process we have to create oppose tweak the position of the joints tweak the skin waiting and then create another pose and do the same tweaks and go back and adjust the first pose based on the changes we made to the second pose so this video only covers the basics if you want to see in depth creation for each of the emotion faces like a smile and a surprise etc you can check out the extended cut for those veto and of course this is only half of the process we still have to create face shapes to allow for talking and on top of that we have to create the control rig so we don't have to pose all of these individual bones in every single frame that we want to animate so those will be tackled in a future video until then thanks for watching I'm James Taylor
