Maya Face Rigging is Easy Now! (Extended Accurig/Advanced Skeleton Tutorial)

hey everybody a couple of you have been asking for the longer form version of my acur face demo I apologize it's taking this long for me to get to it just been a little bit preoccupied if you have any other questions about the process please let me know in the comments and I'll respond to it as soon as I can so without further Ado here's the video I'm just going to bring in my fbx for my character this is a character that I got off of I believe it was CG Trader and uh it's a pretty good base model and everything um so I'm going to basically just clean up this Geo just really quick remove anything that I don't really want um as a base model I don't care about that underwear uh the hair for now we can get rid of and I'm just going to get rid of the corneal so I have my body my eyes my eyelashes my brows and my teeth now the teeth teth are all kind of combined um into one we are going to have to separate these so I'm just going to duplicate these and name them and then I'll basically just go ahead and delete all the faces that I don't need so lower teeth let's just remove all of that my lower teeth are set up my upper teeth I need to set up now and the reason being why you need this geometry to be separate is the way that we wind up feeding it all in later into um Advanced skeleton when we're doing our face Rak so we're just going to delete all this get the tongue set and the last thing that I'll have to do um as far as separating Geo goes is separating my eyes the eyebrows and the eyelashes can be um the same both sides can be in the same piece of geometry so I have this I'm going to go LTI and RTI cool so left and then right so we pretty much have everything set up we have our body our left eye our eyelashes our brows lower teeth upper teeth tongue and our right eye so that's all set I'm just going to go ahead and save this as my start um let just say the character's name I think is Scott so Scott geometry version one let's get that going um there's a few things we have to do before we take this over to acuri uh main things are selecting all of them freeze the Transformations as well as delete all delete by type history I just want to give that a quick run and the last thing we want to do is in our attribute editor go down the pivots we just want to make sure that all the pivots are at zero this is something that'll come in handy later when we go into advanced skeleton for the face rig so that's all set I'm just going to save again everything should be set I'm going to grab all of my geometry export that out as an fbx just say Scott for acurate I always like to say for acuri and then if it's from ACG um in my file name just so I know later on if I ever need to go and grab that file so now we're ready to go into acur so I'm just going to open that up acur is a great great program um for just quick and easy uh rigging so I'm just going to grab my fbx and I'm just going to drag it into here so it's going to import the model I like the force symmetry I have a symmetrical model I know that it's symmetrical um if you don't know if it's symmetrical you don't have to click that you can position everything uh individually afterwards uh instead of checking this or you can for Symmetry and it'll be nice so it finds the center line just hit rig body and it's going to put some kind of locators to place here so I'm just going to go in and just tweak them a little bit now you'll see because I force symmetry it moves alongside it so they have some nice um they have some nice guides here sometimes it just misses just ever so slightly bring that out that seems pretty good and this could come down a little bit legs seem to be pretty good knees ankles come down just a tad you can go over on the left side here now for top um so you can position a few other things sometimes if you're in a kind of like perspective mode As you move it it gets a little funky and will move off uh pretty far but I find that for the most part they really are able to pick everything pretty pretty nicely automatically uh so now I'm going to go to hands I've got normal hands so five fingers once that loads we'll do the same for the fingers again for the most part it is they are pretty good we just like to just clean it up just a little bit cool and now we'll finalize our character that's pretty much the extent of the rigging once this kind of calculates and loads you'll see that we can actually see our rigged character with a couple of different motion capture uh assets so we can actually see how it's looking so for the most part it's pretty good here's a little bit more of like a uh range of motion test can also if you really wanted to adjust little things for the mo cap but this is just for the moap it's just for the pose if you want to see the hands make sure those are all good see that's their fist this is a little bit open so it's pretty good so I'm going to hit export and I'm just going to export this as an fbx uh they do have other applications that you could send it to uh we'll be using Maya today and I'm going to drag in my fbx Scott from acur now for some reason the material that they always give is terrible so just going to throw on the Lambert just so we could see here now everything is all rigged here there are some uh keys on the actual uh skeleton we don't need the keys we can delete those keys so I just cut that there and you can see it's pretty decent there is some kind of stretching but we'll talk about that uh afterwards so there's a few steps that we have to do before or we can start to rig our face in advanced skeleton um for some reason when it exports out of acuri it does something to the geometry that uh Advanced skeleton just frankly does not like um so my workaround to this it's going sound a little ridiculous but it's it seems to work so we're going to just duplicate all of our geometry we'll unlock these and we are just going to freeze Transformations and delete by type history we're just going to do a double check make sure that none of the pivots have changed they shouldn't and that's all set so next step is to skin our new geometry so we're going to go to the rigging tab I'm going to select the hierarchy and I'm going to select just my body I'm going to bind the skin frankly it doesn't really matter what uh what way you do it and I'm going to select my old body and then the new body and I'm going to copy the weights so with that copied we can delete our body so now that we have the body skinned and the weights copied over we need to rig up all the other parts now to work with Advanced skeletons Auto face rig we have to give a joint um we have to give a joint from our current rig for it all to attach to and everything that you want to rig on the face needs to have some sort of skinning to that joint so we're going to go down I am going to go down to the Head controller so in this case it's called CC base head I'm just going to select that singular joint and I'm going to skin everything else to that singular joint so if this moves it moves and if I move all this it follows so now that we have all that set let's save our scene we're going to say Scott rig I'll say body version one now I save that I'm just going to version up so I don't override anything and I can always come back to that file in case I need to an advanced skeleton I'm going to go down to under Tools it's called name matcher if you bring this up it should recognize already the skeleton that's in your file if not the Character Creator 4 is the template that you want all of this should work you just hit check create and place fit skeleton I'm going to show the pole vectors the pull vectors always are off I always just straighten them to hit okay when that popup comes up and then you build the advanced skeleton what this is going to do the name matcher instead of actually having to create a whole new skeleton for the body and everything this sets up the whole entire rig and matches its joints to the ACU rig joints so if I move this it's not going to move around but once I hit constraint joints constraint Two Joints now everything moves around it's pretty great so all this works pretty awesome and if you don't need a face rig you could stop here but we're going to continue with a face rig so I'm going to save the body version two I'm going to save this out as uh face version one we're going to get started with that so I'm just gonna only bring my polygons I think it's nerb surfaces and locators just to clean it up just a little bit now if I go into my Advanced skeleton menu I'm going to hit face here and we're going to go to the pre- section we're going to go down this list it honestly is pretty simple and once you get the hang of it man does it become quick so the first thing to do is select the mask now what's nice about this I'm not going to go into the whole entire tutorial of how to face how to set up everything with the face you can follow along as I do it but if there's you have any question of what is what there's a little question mark here and they will tell you what you should do um it's really nice so if what's the face okay select the face object all head it's all the G geometry that will be following uh that will be affected by that face setup it's pretty nice pretty easy so I'm going to go ahead and I am just going to get started with this select my face mask that was pretty bad let me try one more time go slower this time there we go and then you just hit this B button and it populates it's there now I'm going to select that geometry hit face and it recognizes what that is now I'm going to select all my geometry even though it's the full body that is the geometry so we will select all of that we'll hit all head right eye left eye the teeth and tongue and everything are optional um I do it I'll show you guys again it's not really that much of an issue if you have like facial hair or other hair you would put that on into extras extras could be facial hair a hat whatever it may be um so now I'm going to go down to the rig type I like to use Unreal Engine so I am doing a joint rig I want to make sure it's good for game engine I want the phones I want a motion I have uh roko the head rig so I want to do the Apple AR kit and advanced is the key one for us here so when you hit Advanced that's going to be basically saying okay what's the rig and you're not using an advanced skeleton rig what's the rig for us to attach this all to so we're going to go down we're going to select CC base head and choose head joint and it'll populate for us there they make it nice and easy uh I do use the max influences um I don't know if it truly makes a difference but it works for me now I'm going to go into the fit section and it you'll get some of these popups uh think mainly for the eyes and the jaw but it'll just say hey this is going to replace the eyes from the body setup that's fine that's what we want so it's going to just create this locator here and I'm just going to fit this to where I needan now okay and again I'm just going to kind of Breeze through this a little bit to uh to make this just a little bit quicker Advanced skeleton has some great videos on their YouTube that go into much more detail about how to do things and like I said once you get into it once you start getting the hang of it it's just going to be really easy and you know what you're going to be looking for to set it all up inside the mouth for this one for for for for okay and that should be all set now what we're going to do before we hit the button that builds it all I'm just going to version up and I'm going to save because you can always come back it does actually save all of this so if anything actually needs to be changed or you want it to run through uh again you you could do that now there's two options there's build which just builds the advanced face it doesn't allow you to actually tweak anything fix poses whatnot and then there's a one that will bring you through every step that it goes through personally I just like to hit the one that automatically does it my results have been pretty good so far uh but if you hit this button it doesn't work reopen your file and you could go through and it walks you through a lot of how to tweak things and uh that could help it a lot so I'm just going to hit build advanc face rig and I'm just going to let it do its thing I just realized I'm not showing curves so you don't see what it's also building e great so that's all done now and as you could see I'm going to version up because I always just version up make sure I got it this is all set now so you have your controls now you see here you get some funky funky skinning sometimes and we're going to address that next but you have everything here uh the phones so you can kind of go through everything now there is a way to tweak all the phones all these drivers here as well as the AR kit drivers um if you would like let me know in the comments I can make a video about that it's really pretty simple um but took me a minute to find out and it's helped me out a lot um but yeah let me know if you'd like to see that so this may work for you and this may get everything that you want and you're all set you're ready to go you're ready to animate and get all of this kind of going but for me I hate this chunkiness here um so there's a great tool by Brave rabbit let me uh let me just confirm yeah Brave rabbit BR smooth weights um I'm GNA I'm just going to show that on screen here quick uh this is an amazing tool it is free you can download it off their website I'll put it uh I'll put a link in my description it's fantastic a really really easy way to smooth weight so I'm just going to do wireframe on shaded so I can see I'm going to drag this and you can see just how disgusting it is and the tool is just paint smooth weights tool so now if I go to Tool settings there's a couple of settings here and but it also tells you a lot so it's middle Mouse button so if I select here and I yeah so you have to have the geometry selected and if you hold middle Mouse button you can adjust the brush size and then the strength is up and down um which is nice so I'm just going to make sure I have a good brush size and what's nice about this is you don't necessarily have to actually select any joints you can just do that I'm going to boost up the strength a little bit and you can just start to smooth all of that out you can also mess with the depth a little bit the depth will kind of uh adjust and help smooth anything that's kind of behind not for size for strength so you can see it's starting to get a little bit more so you may have to go through really readjust there we go but you could really start to smooth all of that so if we compare for example just how crunchy this side is to how smooth smoother this side is you could still get a lot more done you can fix things but that's ready to go um there's our join there's lot to smooth out so I'm not going to go through all the smoothing you can see here there's there's some funky stuff so I'm just going to pull that up and then boom smooth that out it's a really really nice really nice and easy tool pretty amazing amazing um but that's pretty much it that's how to get the face rig onto an Acu rig body bre um those few little steps if you don't clean if you don't duplicate and clean that geometry and reskin it and just copy the weights um it does it does not work it will fail um it I forget what the error was but it's something like it can't find find like a lip joint or something um I don't know what it is there's something just funky with the geometry that does come out of acuri so bringing it out cleaning it up it does have the geometry that comes from acuri has like a negative 90 rotation it could be something with a rotation on a blend shape or something that is set up there but you could duplicate it clean it up and there you go uh but great thank you so much for sticking around if you have any questions please let me know in the comments uh any suggestions for things that you would like to see please also let me know in the comments uh uh let me know if there's anything specific you'd like to see and hope to catch you in the next one thanks so much

Channel: Animation Simplified

Views: 1,562

Keywords: animation, autodesk maya, advanced skeleton, unreal engine, accurig, character creator, character rig, blender, professional, smart character animation toolkit, rigging in animation, animation model sheet, animation rigs, 3d modeling and animation, how to start an animation studio, animation and character design, facial expression for animation, rigging and animation, best program for 3d animation, maya face rig, blender face rig, real time vfx, accurig blender addon

Id: n-J9NymlTOk

Length: 26min 15sec (1575 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 10 2024