This week we started to do facial rigging. Step one was to create the joints and constrain them to the face geometry.

After that, I moved on to paint skin weights. It was a little bit tough to do that because when I painted on it the geometry got messed up, so I had to think about what the weights will be influenced when I rotate the joints. I need to keep the mouth open to check what it’ll be looking like while I was painting the weights. One of the problem was that when I paint on some small points, they wouldn’t be affected. Then I figured out a way to fix that is to select the vertices and flood them. It’ll also be more efficient to paint on an area and then start to paint on some details.

We created the controllers and constrained them to the joints. At this point, I was able to transform the three parts of the head.

Next, we started to modify some facial expressions through blend shape in Shape Editor. I used one of the Sculpting Tool to shape an angry face.

I also made eye blinks.

And the shape of skin change when the mouth opens. In order to prevent the mouth opens too large, we set limitation to the values of rotation of the controller.

We also made a couple more expressions.

A tip is that you can use the front camera to do different expressions, and use this to pose the model in Maya as a reference.