Facial Animation Cartoony Maya Rigging Tutorial Part 1 of 2

How to rig a cartoon character's face in Maya using on-screen facial sliders and set driven key to drive simple facial geometry. Part 1 covers using an up and down slider to make the character's upper eyelids blink, and using a 4 way slider to get the brows to go up and down, plus rotate inward and outward. Part 2 shows how to make a nurbs curve mouth, an have a 4 way slider make it open, close, and go wide and narrow by using blend shapes.

Category:

Education

Tags:

• Maya
• character
• rigging
• facial
• animation
• set
• driven
• key
• blend
• shapes
• sliders

[engelbv]

Is there a way to have the slider change the transparency?

[nathanronaldwebb]

@engelbv Hello.Yes. You can have the slider affect the transparency of a shader that you apply to an object. Select the slider as the driver, and the shader as the driven. You'll see Transparency RGB under the shader attributes. That will allow you to make it fade in and out.

[nathanronaldwebb]

I'm glad that you liked the tutorial elemkutuna. Yes, you can use Set Driven Key to make more complex facial animation rigs without using MEL, but if some things don't work or conflict with each other, you can't really "dig into" set driven key and fix it like you can with MEL.

[elemekutuna]

Hey Nathan

those tutorials are so intuitive . is there a chance to make more complex ones without using MEL ?

[nathanronaldwebb]

@elemekutuna Hello. Yes, you can make more complex setups without using expressions. But if you get to a case where multiple set driven key setups are controlling one thing, you can start to get conflicts. Just make sure that only 1 thing is controlling another, and you'll be okay using SDK.

[livingsoul12066]

How did you make the locators for the eyelids etc.?

[nathanronaldwebb]

Hello. Those on screen controllers where from Jason Osipa's book "Stop Staring: Facial Modeling and Animation Done Right." You can make your own by creating a locator, parenting a polygon that is 1 unit wide by 1 unit tall and templated in it's display options (so it just shows up as an outline, and isn't selectable), then make a small nurbs circle for the control object, which you also parent to the locator. Scale up the locator to make it as large as you'd like it to be.

[macgyver2210]

Awesome. You explained more in 7 minutes than they did at school in months.

[engelbv]

@nathanronaldwebb Alright, Thank you so much!

[migeto]

how do you make sliders x.x

[stoneycartoon]

I can't believe it work for me thanks alot for such a understandable tutorials.