Accelerating the Character Creation Pipeline in Maya

I created this course/tutorial for Digital Tutors over February and March of 2015, and on this day it has gone live! Click the picture above to go to the exact place on the site.

What makes this tutorial different is that I use a program called Mixamo Fuse Basic; the free version of their character generator Mixamo Fuse. With huge numbers of sliders to manipulate as well as direct body part editing, Fuse Basic offers an enormous amount of customization options. While the free version has a limited number of base meshes, the customization options makes it an ideal starting point for character creation.

Marie the Mime is a companion character to Marat the Mime. A video test of Marat lip syncing a line from the 1985 comedy Back to School may be seen here:

From there, I import the model as an .obj file into Autodesk Maya and edit the UV map before sending it to Mudbox. There I show how to sculpt detail and paint textures onto the mesh. I conclude by sending the model back to Maya for rendering. In a four hour tutorial, I create a finished, ready-to-rig character from scratch.