WALK THROUGH – KITOSAN
Concept Art: Kepler Studio (web link)
Playback Speed: Tutorials Real Time (Scroll Down)
Software: Maya 2020
Level: Beginner/Intermediate
Download: coming soon (Maya 2020)
DESCRIPTION
This is a recreation of the Kitosan character in this clip .
This is a full realtime walkthrough tutorial, you’ll see multiple variations of rigging the face with different techniques. The video above is a quick animation with the internal eyes and mouth animated.
More videos coming.
1. MODEL BLOCK
This video shows the blocking stage of Kitosan in full including the creation of reference images.
2. LIGHTING THE BLOCK MODEL
This short video covers lighting the blocked Kitosan model with the Zoo2 Light Presets.
3. MANUAL JOIN – EARS & FINGERS
This video demonstrates how to manually join objects without Quad Draw. This technique can be handy in a number of situations.
4. RETOPOLOGIZE JOIN – TOES, LEGS, TORSO
This video covers joining objects with Quad Draw. This technique is called retopology where you rebuild a new mesh by snapping it to the existing mesh.
5. UV UNWRAP
This video shows how you can unwrap the UVs ready for texturing.
6. SEND MODEL TO MUDBOX
See how to send models to Mudbox in this video. There are three different ways to send files.
1. Send To Mudbox in the File menu.
2. .OBJ Export
3. .FBX Export
7. MUDBOX INTRODUCTION – PAINTING THE FACE
This video is an introduction to Mudbox. You’ll learn the basics of mudbox and how to start to paint textures, and send them back to Photoshop and Maya.
8. STRAIGHTEN ARMS FOR RIGGING
In this video we straighten the arms and keep the UVs ready for rigging.
9. INSTALL RAPID RIG MODULAR
This video shows you how to install Rapid Rig Modular and create the the shelf icons.
To open your Maya Preferences Folder folder. Paste the code below into a Python Tab, highlight, and press play. Your Maya Preferences Folder will open.
import os, sys, subprocess
import maya.mel as mel
directoryPath = os.path.abspath(os.path.join(mel.eval("internalVar -upd") , "../.."))
if sys.platform == "win32":
os.startfile(directoryPath)
else:
opener = "open" if sys.platform == "darwin" else "xdg-open"
subprocess.call([opener, directoryPath])
print "Maya Preferences Directory Path: ", directoryPath
10. CREATE RAPID RIG PROXIES & RIG
This video shows how to place your pivot point positions with Rapid Rig Modular’s Proxies. At 17:00 you can see how to generate the rig.
11. SIZE RAPID RIG CONTROLS
This video shows you how to adjust the size and position of your controls with Rapid Rig Modular. You’ll also see how to hide certain controls too.
12. BIND SKIN AND SETTINGS
This video shows how to select and group the skin joints into selection sets. You’ll see how to bind the skin joints with the standard and heat map settings.
13. CREATE A RANGE OF MOTION
This video shows how to animate the Range Of Motion. By animating a range of motion skinning you’ll speed up your workflow for the later skinning steps and animation.
14. INSTALL SKIN TOOLS
This video shows how to install the skinning scripts. These scripts are found in the Week 6 folder on One Drive.
1. Braverabbit Smooth Skin Weights
2. Skin Wrangler
To open your Maya Preferences Folder. Paste the code below into a Python Tab, highlight, and press play. Your Maya Preferences Folder will open.
import os, sys, subprocess
import maya.mel as mel
directoryPath = os.path.abspath(os.path.join(mel.eval("internalVar -upd") , "../.."))
if sys.platform == "win32":
os.startfile(directoryPath)
else:
opener = "open" if sys.platform == "darwin" else "xdg-open"
subprocess.call([opener, directoryPath])
print "Maya Preferences Directory Path: ", directoryPath
15. REMODEL ARM TO MATCH RIG JOINTS
This video shows you how to change topology and remodel your arm after skinning.
We can change and add topology to match the rig so that its easier to skin and so that the mesh deforms nicely. You’ll also see how to Transfer UVs.
16. SKINNING THE ARM
This video shows a great method of skinning twist joints with Skin Wrangler, you’ll also see how to smooth the skinning with Braverabbit’s Smooth Skin Weights.
17. SKINNING THE HANDS & FINGERS
Skinning the hands and fingers
18. SKINNING THE HEAD AND EARS
This video shows how to skin the head and ears. You’ll also see a trick for switching the weights of one joint onto another.
19. SKINNING THE BODY AND LEGS
This video shows how to skin the body, legs and toes. You’ll see how to use an extra mesh as a skin cage to easily skin the upper body. Both Transfer Skin Weights and Transfer UVs are used in this video.
20. POSING TESTS
Now that the rig is finished, it’s worth posing the character to see if there are any issues. You’ll also see some rig settings like how to switching between IK and FK with space switching, squash and stretch and setting the head and FK arms to world space.
21. FIX FINGER SKINNING
In the posing video we found that there were some problems with the finger skinning. This video shows how to fix the weights around the knuckles.
22. MODEL CLOTHES
Kitosan has no clothes, but most characters you’ll build will have some for of appendages or clothes. In this video you’ll see how to model some clothes for the female version of Kitosan, lets call her Kitochan which is a feminine Japanese nickname!
23. RIG CLOTHES
Time to rig the clothes, here you’ll see how to rig manually with a few Zoo Tools 2 Tools.
– Joint Tool Window
– Control Creator
– Reparent Group Toggle
You’ll see how to skin the shirt and then rig the skirt and parent it inside Rapid Rig Modular.
24. FACIAL RIGS OVERVIEW
This video talks about the four facial rigs we hope to cover in this series. We’ll be covering a variety of facial styles.
25. MODELING INTERNAL EYES MOUTH
This video shows how to model internal face and eyes with circular edge loops. The inside of the mouth (mouth sock) will be left for another video.
26. MODEL BROWS LASHES
In this video you’ll see how to model the eyelashes and brows.
27. MODEL INNER MOUTH TEETH AND TONGUE
In this video you’ll learn a great technique for how to model the inner mouth sock, teeth and a tongue. We’ll also UV unwrap and complete this face mesh.
28. EYE BROW RIG
A good introduction to more manual rigging by rigging the brows here with straight fk joints.
29. RIG TRIPLE JAW
You’ll see how to manually rig the triple jaw in this video. The triple jaw joint system will be used in combination with blendshapes. It’s a simple rig that works powerfully well in combination with blendshapes while animating lip sync.
You can also check out the prebuilt Triple Jaw Drag & Drop Rig here which is for realistic jaws and faces.
30. MOUTH BLENDSHAPES
In this video you’ll see how to use Maya’s Shape Editor to create a range of mouth blendshapes. The mouth shapes list is as follows.
– Smile
– Frown
– Pout
– Grrr
– Oooh
– In
– Out Widen
– Ffff
31. ADVANCED BLENDSHAPES – BRAVERRABBIT SHAPES
This video shows an advanced blendshape workflow using the Braverabbit SHAPES plugin.
You’ll learn about,
– Splitting Shapes
– Combining Shapes
– Driven Shapes
– Combo Shapes
– Painting Shape Weights
You can try out this great plugin for free and if you decide to use it for longer the private/student version is very reasonably priced at only $20 USD.
You can download SHAPES here , email me to get your student copy at andrewsilke@gmail.com.
32. RIG TEETH, TONGUE, NOSE
This video shows how to rig the teeth, tongue and nose.
33. RIG EYES AND EYELIDS
This video shows how to rig the eyes and eyelids with the drag and drop eye skin slide rig. This is a pre-built rig that’s specially made for spherical embedded eyes and realistic eye setups.
You can download the Eye Rig here .
34. SHAPES CONTROL ATTRIBUTES & SKIN FIX
This video shows how to hookup the blendshape attributes to the mouth shape circle control.
There’s also an issue with the skinning that hasn’t mirrored correctly that we need to fix too.
35. RIG THE EYE LASHES
This video shows how to rig the eye lashes.
36. FACIAL RIG ANIMATED
This video is a demonstration video of finished animation on the rig. You can see the lip sync rig and expressions holds up nicely.
You’ll learn how to animate later in this series.
37. RENDERED ANIMATION
This is the same animation as above now rendered.
38. AUTO REBUILD RIG WHICH OFTEN DOESN’T WORK
This video shows the automatic rebuild of Rapid Rig Modular which is quite flakey and often doesn’t work correctly. See the following three videos for how to rebuild Rapid Rig Modular manually.
39. INSTALL SAVE SKIN WEIGHTS SCRIPT
If you do not want to lose your skin weights, install the Braverabbit Transfer Skin Weights script to save and import your skin weights. This video shows how to install the tool and basic use.
Download the install file from dropbox.
40. KITOSAN SAVE SKIN WEIGHTS
This video shows how to name and save out the Kitosan skin weights so they can be imported back in after the manual rebuild is finished.
You’ll see how to use the Braverabbit Transfer Skin Weights script.
41. MANUAL REBUILD RAPID RIG MODULAR
This video will show you how to manually Rebuild Rapid Rig Modular. Which is much more solid a workflow and will allow you to rebuild the rig without errors. This video covers,
– Deleting Rapid Rig Modular from the file
– Saving the Mesh and Custom controls to a new file.
– Saving out the Rapid Rig Proxies
– Saving out the Control Shape Data
– Rebuilding the rig in a new file
– Importing the skin weights and reparenting the custom controls
Code to unlock the Rapid Rig Modular groups, add to a python tab in the script editor, highlight and press play.
from maya import cmds
allNodes = cmds.ls()
for node in allNodes:
cmds.lockNode(node, l=False)
42. 2D ANIMATED TEXTURES – HYPERSHADE INTRODUCTION
This video is an introduction to Maya’s Hypershade window, this will help in the next video where we map a 2d animated texture onto Kitosan’s face.
43. ADD A 2D ANIMATED FACE TEXTURE
This video shows how to add a 2d animated face texture and project it onto Kitsan’s face.
The 2d animation was created in Photoshop and animated at 12 frames per second (animated on twos), it was exported as a png sequence with a transparent background.
In Maya we’ll apply the texture and adjust the timing so it fits the new frame rate of 24 frames per second (animated on ones).
44. KITOSAN 2D ANIMATED FACE RENDER
The 2d animated face rendered in Arnold.
45. RIG A RUBBER HOSE (TUBE/DONUT) MOUTH
This video shows how to model and rig a rubber hose mouth. This is a fun rigging demo that uses Maya’s Wire Deformer instead of skinning and there are a few tricks to follow.
46. RIG THE BACK OF RUBBER HOSE MOUTH
This video shows how to create the inner mouth geo so that it follows with the rubber hose face.
47. MODEL REPLACEABLE EYES
Here we model up the replaceable eyes, and some brows. We’ll model four different eyes that we will switch and hide between when we animate.
– Regular Squished Eye
– Blink Regular
– Blink Happy
– Blink Triangle
48. SKIN REPLACEABLE EYES
Now we’ll skin up the replaceable eyes and iris. The eye mesh and all blinks will be skined to the same joint, and the iris will be a joint that’s the child of the eye.
49. ADD BLENDSHAPES TO REPLACEABLE EYES
Now you’ll see how to add blendshapes to the replaceable eyes. We’ll add the shapes in creative ways so we can get a variety of shapes in our animation.
50. ANIMATION – RUBBER MOUTH REPLACEABLE EYES
Viewport animation of the replaceable face with rubber-hose mouth.
51. RENDER RUBBER MOUTH ANIMATION
Rendered animation of the replaceable face with rubber-hose mouth.
52. RETOPOLOGY MODELING TRICK FOR HAIR
This method shows how to combine hair sphere with Boolean > Union and then Remesh and Retopologize to get a good joined mesh ready to render.
MORE VIDEOS COMING
TOOLS USED
– Zoo 2 Hotkeys
– Image Plane Tool
– Zoo Mirror Geo
– Shader Manager
– Light Presets
– Skin Utilities
– Zoo Renamer
– Thick Extrude
– Reparent Group Toggle
– Rapid Rig Modular
– Skin Wrangler
– Braverabbit Smooth Skins
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