Creating Face Rig Controls in Maya

I’m an old man and don’t fully understand Tumblr, so I don’t know if there’s a better way to respond to this. RedSorrel/Cadaverous asked:

I really like the sliders you’ve set up, do you have a tutorial (yours or someone else’s) for setting that up for a face rig? Awesome model and I’m looking forward to future updates!

I’m using blend shapes for the eyes/mouth and set driven keys for the eyebrows. As for creating the UI, it’s all NURBS shapes with certain channels locked down. For example, my sliders can only move in the Y axis. The X and Z axes are locked, as are rotation and scale.

You’ll want to limit the amount your slider curves can move. First, move them to their default position and modify > freeze transformations so you can easily reset them to zero. Then apply your transform limits in the attribute editor as shown below:

To make UI labels, slider backgrounds, etc non-selectable, select them and use display > object display > template. If you want to untemplate something you’ll have to select in in the outliner and use untemplate.

To change the colors of your curves, go to the Attribute Editor, select Display > Drawing Overrides, check Enable Overrides, and adjust the slider below. You’ll have to do this for each individual curve.

Lastly, to combine curves into one object as I’ve done for the upper eyelid controls (they don’t move independently of each other), follow the steps in this video by Cerina Tahir.

hatchet + rugs

Feeling… discouraged… with rigging and character control stuff, so I’m taking a break to do some art! Here are a few village structures buildings. I’m going to make more but it feels like a good start.

I’m also trying something new with my palette and defining highlights/shadows for each of my colors, which has really come in handy while vert painting in Maya.

A quick summary of my approach to cel-shaded eyeballs, at least so far. This very well might change tomorrow if I find a better way.

Some style experiments.

Status update: I’d been working a design contract for the last couple weeks that hadn’t left me any time to work on gamedev/art stuff, but now I’m back! I wanted to write up a quick summary of where I’m at with this project, both for my own good and cause I like when other people write about what they’re working on.

This character (wolf? coyote? I should know these things) is pretty close to being rigged. I’m at the scary point where something that looks good as a static model ends up looking awful once it’s rigged and posed, but I’m trying to get past my fear of mediocrity so I can get to the fun of animating walk cycles and bringing those into Unity. I haven’t done any weight painting yet because there are a few things I want to change about the rig, and I think I might need to remodel the mouth for more expressiveness. I’ve been following this tutorial ($50 but it’s been on sale twice recently) while learning rigging, and it’s been really helpful.

As for Unity, well… I’ve never used it before, but I’m pretty familiar with UE3 and there’s some overlap in concepts. I followed along with the first half of this tutorial (free) for the foundation of a 3rd person character controller + camera, though to be honest I didn’t really understand what I was doing on the coding side of things. I might just try to use Unity’s stock 3rd person setup, but I’m really not sure what the best approach here is going to be. I’ll cross that bridge when I get there, but obviously it’s going to involve a lot of C# study.

 I know everyone says start simple, but… shrug. I’m having fun, and if it all crashes and burns then I’ll have still learned a lot that I can apply to my next project.