The Face Rig (Part 03)

This next part is about the controls I would like to use for the facial rig of the Heavy. As you can see in the picture I have placed small circles on top of the joints. Each of these controls consists of three layers (starting from the top of the hierarchy to the bottom):

1. Constraint Node - invisible and is used to blend the position and rotation between the upper and the lower jaw parts using parent constraints
2. SDK Node - invisible and is used for creating mouth or facial shapes with the help of the Set Driven Key tools in Maya
3. Animation Control - visible and is used for animating manually offsets from the pre-made SDK mouth shapes
   

This facial set up is inspired from the tutorial that I found a while ago created by Canadian 3D Animator Chris Fram. Unfortunately his site www.dirtyoldtoon.com does not exist anymore, where I actually found the tutorial, but check out his blog. I hope later I have time to show you how I made this simplified version of the rig (with video and more details).

The Face Rig (Part 02)

This weekend I was doing some work on the Heavy facial rig again. After some thinking I decided to separate the head from the body. I also deleted the faces that represented eyeballs on the decompiled model and replaced them with real spheres. All that made me realize that to make my work easier for later I needed to separate the inside parts of the mouth as objects of their own.

I allowed myself to make small adjustments to the tongue geometry and the inside of the mouth, just because i needed the model to work well with joint driven facial rig.

For the actual tongue movement I have decided to use a few blend shapes, but for now I am not sure what the result will be... I promise to share it with you even if it's unsuccessful :)

The Face Rig (Part 01)

The progress up to now with the Heavy. I have decided to make a new facial rig not made of Blend Shapes (Morph Targets) but instead using bones. By using a helpful small tool called VTAapply (you can find a bit more about it here) I manged to import the Heavy in-game blend shapes into Maya. This way I can use them for reference on where to place the facial bones. You can see on the video that the targets have different vertex numbers and that is why it's making distortion once blended. By doing my own facial rig I will have much more freedom during the animation of the characters... and I sure like freedom.

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The Beginning

Sooo ... welcome to my first blog. I have decided to share with you the process of making a short film, starring a couple of characters from the game Team Fortress 2. The blog (hopefully) will include everything from the decompiled, imported assets in Maya to the completed product. I hope you find the info here interesting and maybe even useful. Since we all love pictures i will include a snapshot of the Heavy model in the Maya viewport. All the models that you see on this blog are property and created by the very talented people at ValveSoftware (www.valvesoftware.com). I don't take credit for any of them unless stated so.