Face Rigging for Beginners

In Face Rigging for Beginners, you’ll learn how to create a simple yet fully functional face rig using only joints in Maya – which will also work for real-time and game engines. You’ll be guided through everything in real-time, from the initial joint setup of the face, weight painting to finalizing the rig. Learn how to create the main rig structure, mouth setup, rigging eyes, eyebrows, and more!

By the end of this course, you will be able to create your own simple yet effective face rig and have a solid understanding of how the rigging process works when using joints. Rigging for Beginners is perfect for students who are already familiar with Maya, but who are new to rigging. What you learn will serve as a foundation for when you’re getting into advanced face rigging for production.

FACE RIGGING OVERVIEW
• Introduction: Covering basic knowledge of facial expressions and what good facial topology is.
• Main Structure: Creating the main structure for the face rig: The neck and head and jaw joints. Then we’ll create the controls to drive those joints and start with the skinning of the character.
• Mouth Setup: Making the setup for the mouth, it will be quite simple but versatile and will allow us to create a lot of shapes around the mouth and lips.
• Other Elements: Add the joints and controls for other areas, such as ears, cheeks, nose, gums/teeth, and tongue.
• Eyes: Creating the setup for the eyes, including the lookAt control as well as the eyelids setup.
• Eyebrows: Eyebrows setup where we will create a simple setup with joints that’ll allow us to pose the eyebrows for the expressions we need.
• Final Steps: For the final chapter we will be cleaning up and finalizing the rig. As well as doing a test animation to see how it works, and finally testing it on the game engine.