How do I make a Face rig

[duart3costacunha]

Hello there Maya people, i've been wanting to add a face rig to my almost finished rig and I am extremely confused about this. From what I gathered, you can do face rigs with blend shape or make an actual rig that controls the facial expressions, however I have a few questions.

1. Is the head supposed to be seperated from the body? (On my case I have the mesh all in one)
2. Any good tutorials on how to make actual face rigs for the jaw and eyes?

3. Which one of these is the best option for a simple character like mine?

Would gladly appreciate any answers 🙂

[Baboonian]

Simply use the "advanced scel" face system. In my latest character, the head is separated from the body. This gives me a lot of freedom for creativity. I will attach them before publishing. 

 

[Kahylan · Accepted solution]

Hi!

As to your questions:
1) Yes and No. You can have your face separated from the body. Which makes your Rig faster, but you also need to make sure to that you have "check Topology" turned off when creating the Blenshape. But it doesn't have to be separated. Separating it is a good Idea in really high defintion meshes. But It doesn't really matter if you have less than 50'000 polygones (unless you have 100 Blendshapes).
2)AntCGI, this is the first part of facial Rigs in his rigging series:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UpHKfUPyyBI
There are a lot of smaller channels out there as well, some of them might only discuss a part of the facial rig. Simply search " maya facial rig" to find most of them. There are also many pay to view options to learn this.
3) Your character seems rather simple. So I think the best option for him is a joint based jaw and blendshape based Eyebrows, eyelids and lips. This will be fast and still give you some degree of freedom in the facial expressions.

I hope this helps!

[duart3costacunha]

Hi there, I have to thank you for these great suggestions, but I do have another question. Since I've already skinned my auto-rig, how do I exactly combine the jaw joints to the rest of the body without breaking the weight skin painting?

[Kahylan · Accepted solution]

Hi!

Once you created the jaw joint and put it in the right place in the hierarchy, you can add joints to an existing skincluster by using the "Add Influence" Command. Select the joints you want to add and the mesh, Then you use the command (Rigging Toolset, Skin>Edit Influences>Add Influence) click on the box next to the command and make sure the "lock weights" option is checked and that the "Default Weight" Option is set to 0. With those two options you wont mess up the existing weights.

You'll have to unlock the joint in the paintweights tool before you can add influence to it.

I hope this helps!

[duart3costacunha]

Alright! I just did that, and it works pretty good, thank you so much for the help Kahylan, I really appreciate it!