Maya

7. Add eyelid influences: you need to add the upperLid and lowerLid influences for each eye. Toggle hold weights on and set to 0 so you don�t take influence away from the influence curves



8. Paint weights: The first thing I do is weight the areas that wont move to the skull holder joint


Once that is done, the only area you will likely need to do a lot of editing on is the mouth (upperLip and lowerLip curve influences). The others are generally pretty good by default except around the eyelids. Toggle the hold weights of the eyelid joints off and paint the membership to each respective eyelid joint.


This should fix a lot of the weighting on the eyebrow curves, but you will need to do some fine-tuning and smoothing regardless. As an artistic note, you probably want to have a little overlapping in your weight painting so the nose moves a little when the upper lip moves, etc, but not to much that the animator has to counter-animate controls to keep portions of the face still.


9. Add eye rigging: I�m not going to go into detail on how to rig the eyes as that is pretty simple and there are a number of ways to do it. obviously you want to create a control that drives the rotation of the joints to open and close the eyes and you might want to take it a step further and add a sculpt deformer or some sort of extra movement to the joints as the eyes rotate to get some simulation of sub-dermal deformation as the eyeballs move under the eyelids.


10. Add mouth rigging: You will want to tie some sort of control to the jaw for manipulating the mouth- we just use driven keys from an attribute, but you could rig it a number of ways. What�s important for our rig is that you create an expression, driven key or use utility nodes to drive the extra jaw joints that control the corners of the mouth [See figures 10.1, 10.2].

Figure 10.1 (avi movie)

Figure 10.2 (avi movie)

You can even create an attribute that drives the amount of averaging to achieve different effects. We simply make the rotations a percentage of the jaw rotation. For example, the left side would be driven by an expression like so as the jaw opens, the corners move down to compensate by about half as much. Extra automation would move the corners in and rotate them a tad, too.


11. Add hair/eyebrow/eyelash rigging: Since I am focusing on the facial rigging I won�t go into details, but just for the record, we used geometry for our hair on Delgo, so the hair, eyebrows and eyelashes were pretty simple. We bound the hair with lattices and used some influence from the faceCurve control hulls to layer some movement in the brow region. For the eyebrows we copied the bind from the head to the brows so it was like they were wrapped to the skin- thus when the forehead deformed, the brows would follow. The eyelashes were simply parented to the corresponding eyelid joint. If you used Maya Hair or paint effects hair, etc, you obviously would have a different workflow and there are a number of ways you could bind geometry based hair depending on your character type..