Auto Rig Face

This class explores a simple yet powerful “triple jaw setup” that’s easy to understand and gives animators a lot of control when combined with facial blendshapes. Three pivots are use for the jaw instead of the usual one. With clever skinning and a nice parenting structure we can easily create a jaw and mouth setup that’s easy to use and powerful.

We’ll find out how to rig a realistic eye in this class. This version is a very simple setup that supports full automatic lid follow and blinks and will work on a wide variety of characters with rounded eye balls, creatures too. We’ll build the eye rig manually but later we can grab the Drag And Drop Face Rig which is a fully customisable version of this setup with a few extra bells and whistles that can be setup in a few minutes.

This page contains The Drag And Drop Face Rig a simple yet powerful facial rig designed to work with a blendshape system. This is a super easy rig to setup, simply drag and drop it onto your Maya scene, place the pivots and tweak as desired using the rigs attributes. Joints will drive the eyes and “the triple jaw joint” setup and then we’ll add a blendshape system for full facial control.

This class covers the setup of an eye lash and eye brow rig. We’ll use follicles which is the easy solution to what can be a difficult task. Ordinarily eyelashes and brows are tricky because we may have extra skinned geo following those areas, it’s difficult to maintain volumes in some of these areas. But with the follicle setup we can do this easily, though there are some little tricks along the way.

In this class we’ll explore blendshape facial setup with brave rabbit’s SHAPES 2.0 plugin that is a must have tool for blendshape facial setup. SHAPES makes it easy to do a lot of complicated tasks such as driven key correctives, sculpting shapes, tweaking and mirroring, editing renaming and managing all of our shapes. SHAPES 2.0 also goes much deeper but we’ll save those features for another class. SHAPES comes with a free personal learning edition so it’s easy to get started.