Accelerating the Face Rigging Process in Maya

Accelerating the Face Rigging Process in Maya is the third and possibly last in the “Accelerating…” series, I created this course/tutorial for Digital Tutors, and it was released on June 17, 2015. Click on the image to go directly to the tutorial.

Rigging the face of a character can be a lot of fun, especially if it is well modeled with the understanding that it will have to perform a wide range of expressions and shapes. Fortunately, the models created with Maximo/Adobe's Fuse Basic program has well-formed topology that can be edited in either Maya or Mudbox to create shapes for facial rigging.

In this tutorial, the system I present uses a combination of head shapes and joint enhanced deformation to create a character that is fairly flexible. As Marie the Mime is a segmented character–that is, she has separate pieces for the head, torso, legs, hands and feet. (I present her actual creation in "Accelerating the Character Creation Process in Maya".); it is relatively easy to isolate her head for sculpting in Mudbox. For single skin characters, I also present a technique where the head is wrapped around a full-body Blendshape as an intermediate step. (click 'step' to go the individual lesson, but you will need a subscription to view the video.)

This tutorial's techniques integrate primarily with a rig that has been created with my second tutorial, "Accelerating the Character Rigging Process in Maya"; but they may be applied to models and rigs that have been created using other rigging and modeling methods.