Bone-Based Mouth Setup

This tutorial is for advanced Maya users to provide an alternative to the standard facial setup using blend shapes. I find that blend shapes are good for simple setups, but making all of those shapes gets tedious after a while and using the same shapes over and over can begin to look, well, "computerish" for lack of a better term. I also find that they can start interfering with each other causing strange-looking deformations. This method is a bone-based deformation system. It gives the flexibility to make unique poses and freely animate facial controls while still being able to use sliders for specific expressions and lip sync phonomes, useful if a character is to be used a lot without a specific goal in mind.