Post 48 - Face controls & Additional Manipulation

I have finally finished constructing the Maya face user interface (seen above). This has taken a very long time to construct, but I used a lot of the principles seen in the Max rig. The slider and joystick controllers were very easy to make (the clip from PolyFaceCom demonstrates this in the previous log). In Max however, the method for a constrained controller in a box was done using scripting (although I have heard that there is a much simpler way to do this in 3ds Max 2011). In Maya, it is a case of:


1. create a circle (joystick)
2. create a box to house it
3. parent the circle to the box
4. ensure that the transformations for both items have been frozen (zeroed out)
5. go into the attributes editor - constraints and set the maximum and minimum values to that of the box
6. DONE
7. HAPPY


Very straight forward and clean. Once these have been made, it was a case of assessing the facial / animator's needs. Some sliders control several joints. All connections with joints or blend shapes are done using driven keys as they can be used to wire pretty much anything. Above is the UI, with descriptions of what they drive. On top of the jaw, phoneme and brows, I have also created various eye controller,s as well as a sneer function, and pupil sliders. The pupils are also a series of blend shapes, (dilate and contract) which have been wired using driven keys. So when the slider is down, dilate shape kicks in and when it is down, contract kicks in. Another way to manipulate the eyes would be to have a set driven key on the scale of the pupil (siumilar to the 3ds max rig). This way, the pupils would be self sufficient and wouldn't have to rely on blend shapes. But for the purposes of this rig, I think using blend shapes is fine.

Blend Shapes applied to main eyes

I have also decided to create an advanced toggle slider, which controls all of the face manipulator's visibility channels, so when it is toggled to the right, the manipulators become visible, so you can animate individual points. In addition, there is a main brow controls, which moves all six joint controls, which make up both brows.