Facial Rigging

Description
I present to you, a easy understandable way, to rig a face. In this tutorial I show my way of Facial Rigging, I think it is the easiest, fastest and best way to do it. It is joint based with facial controllers and additional joystick controllers.

Programs Used

Maya

Tutorial by
Dennis Jensen

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How can i move the eye according to the body????? Please help me!!

D. 2013-01-22

I have the same problem as mark nalewaiski mentioned above. I have made facial rigging as you shown in your Facial Rigging tutorial, But when head joints(neck) are moved or rotated sideways, the face is getting stretched. My facial controllers are not following corresponding to the movement of the head joints. I tried parenting the controllers to the head joint. Nothing works. Still stretching. PLEASE HELP ME!!!
D. 2013-01-21

hai,I am a newcomer,how can I download this..?
D. 2012-06-23

Thanks for your comments guys :)
D. 2012-03-26

thank for your help, the way of your teaching is so good, and i dont have any words to say it thanks for everything.
D. 2012-03-14

I would love to see more facial rigging tutorials! Thank you so much for sharing your knowledge with us!
D. 2012-03-07

I love to watch POLYFACE Tutorials........................
D. 2011-12-18

Hi Dennis

I am a new user for your website. I really like your tutorials. For this type of service thank U very much.
D. 2011-12-01

Hey Ramesh.

Whats the problem?
D. 2011-10-20

hello this is ramesh

i have want some about ribbon rig in maya,somethink doing mistake in ribbon rig
so could y halp me about this
D. 2011-10-17

Guidosalimbeni:
Thanks for your comments :)

1. No the attributes dosn’t have to be aligned when you are using set driven key. and 1 on one object can be 10 on a other. But Maya calculates the differencial, so it is a bit slower than direct connection.

2. Yes you would need to turn off renderable, and even some options for final gather if you are using that.

3. Yeah I have seen that, but I didn’t really look into it, so I don’t know. Sorry.

RoryMc:
Hey Thanks for your comment :) I’m sorry I dont know any animation tutorials. For the keyable attributes, you can not have a connection or contraints to a object you want to key, therefore you will need to make a group ontop of the object and use that group to plug in the connection or contraint. I hope it makes sense :)

Cheers
/Dennis
D. 2011-10-07

Just wondering do you know of any good tutorials for animating a rig similar, to this one I have followed your tutorials but am having problems with some of the keyable attributes on my controllers, and have been trying to figure out how to successfully use character groups
thanks
D. 2011-10-06

and just a couple of questions more if I can:
after creating the nurbs surface CTRL do I need to set renderable option to off? or is there another solution (could make sense to delate the material node?)

- I have seen some rig having a GUI opening with a background or even opening as a separated window inside maya, floating in the screen.. how could i do that? is that hard to do?

thankyou very much
Guido
D. 2011-10-06

Hi Dennis, this is really great I wish i had seen this before. A question about setting driven key: do I need to set the value of translating of the GUI controls matching the value of the translating of the related face controls? I mean if the CTRL on the Gui goes up of 10 even the related CTRL on the face need to goe up abut 10? I saw a tutorial on the web that cares about weird animation curve when the driver movement is not allign in a direct proportional way with the movement of the driven .. Is it right ?
Thanks a lot
Guido
D. 2011-10-06

Zainab:
I’m glad you could use it :) Thanks for the link.
D. 2011-09-17

Hi!
i followed your tutorials of modeling and basically rigging. it was a superb experience and it helped me a lot in my final thesis animation. I am done with it now so I thought I should give a link of it here and thank you for tremendous help. may you always rock! :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O2uFkBe6uwk
D. 2011-09-15

nice :)
D. 2011-09-04

I enjoyed your brow face rig. I have one problem though.I have tried every way to get the controls to move with the head joint. I get face warping. It is good until I add the drivers.I parented the controls to the face joints with I then did the same between the head joint and all the face joints.This just canceled out the driver.If I don't add a constraint to the face controls and head joint, then the controls don't follow, stretching the face. I've been at this for days and nothing works and can't find one tutorial to explain this type of rig in full. PLEASE HELP!
D. 2011-07-20

Hi!
i have been following your series whole time! so its really great! but after doing facial rigging i dont know what to do with the brows!
how will be attaching eye brows to the face, or follow the skin! please reply asap. i am kind of clueless here!
D. 2011-07-07

Hi Dennis

First off! Amazing tute's! Really helpful, I have always used blendshapes and have desired to create facial rigs etc, so again! Thanks.

I did have a question regarding taking the facial rig and creating sets of expressions, how would you go about this. Or what would be the simplest solution??
D. 2011-06-27

Nice tutorial. Thanks a lot guys, you show me something that i try to find :)
D. 2011-05-28

very good£¡
D. 2011-05-12

Great tutorial! Thanks for taking the time creating them.
I would definitely appreciate a tutorial for the eyes and mouth tutorial too.
Also, I'm new to this so I don't quite understand how to make the brow and hair to follow the surface, maybe you could elaborate on that a little bit too.

Either way, great job! Very appreciated :D

Cheers
D. 2011-05-09

Awesome Dude i love ur tutorials. Im learnign CG graphics for games which includes everything. I find ur tutorials really good and clear. Keep up the good work!
D. 2011-04-12

Arth:
I'm not sure if I understand the question but I will try to answer anyway.

1. Bump is faking the surface of the mesh, so it can look extruded. It is very good for small details. I can't tell you about all the different textures right now, because that would require a whole new tutorial :) But if you want, I can write it on my todo list.

2. It is nice to have hair, brow and buttons as separete objects because you dont want them to follow the joints you made. You want them to follow the surface of the mesh instead. It will look more naturel. Otherwise if you just skin the buttons they might now follow the surface of your jacket.

Antonio:
I use Driven Key here, because it gives you more control. And if you wanted to move the brow in more axes it is easier to control with a driven key. With a parent it can look strange. But I guess you could use a parent if you wanted. It is just to get more control.

Cheers
D. 2011-03-20