FACIAL RIGGING TOOLS

[Tochukwunwankwere20]

Without a doubt, this is one feature that every 3ds max animator is desperately in need of.

There are no tools out there that simplifies the process as nicely as advanced skeleton for maya. 

So, how about we have something like follicles in xgen, or a new kind of helper object that can be attached and linked to deformable meshes without throwing back a dependency loop error.

A helper object that can move with the lip for instance, and can also be used to control the weighted portions of the lip or objects controlling the lip.

There are alternative ways of cheating this by creating a Dorito effect, but this has proven to be inefficient in large scale productions without being a coding expert, and it also takes a heavy toll on viewport performance.

[ACCCC]

Paul Neale has a pretty good tutorial for bone based facial rigging on his channel

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SKomaUCHAko

But yeah the rigging tools, morpher/shape keys and skinning in max definitely could use a major update... a really big one.

It's not really beginners friendly especially when you compare it to rigging toolkits in other DCC's like Blender or Maya

[Tochukwunwankwere20]

yeah. he does, but that method is quite outdated now.

[dg3duy]

I understand your frustration perfectly, I live it day by day in production. Right now I'm designing my own facial rig system using maxscript, I've been working on it for months.

[Tochukwunwankwere20]

@dg3duy This looks good. we need all the help we can get...

[baglantulebay]

@dg3duy Hi Friend, your work looks amazing! Where may we see your works with rigging?(If you don't mind of course:) )

[dg3duy]

@baglantulebay

I'll be uploading more material soon... I'm in the final stage of testing

 https://www.artstation.com/artwork/184JQq 

[Tochukwunwankwere20]

Here is what we need.

https://youtu.be/W6_MTX6MfMM

[Tochukwunwankwere20]

here's what i was trying to explain for facial rigging...a dorito effect.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGe2KS3c5uc

[abacusprime123]

I agree with what everybody wrote here. I think it ultimately has to be something simple, like a pre-made facial rig. The rig would have an open line that says 'mouth open', 'mouth smile', 'eyes closed', 'phenotype a' and the like. We would create the morph targets with the same name to match those parameters. Then click a button and the morph targets would be linked to the rig.