From the course: Maya: Facial Rigging

Getting the jaw pivot right - Maya Tutorial

From the course: Maya: Facial Rigging

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Getting the jaw pivot right

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- [Instructor] With the head joints in place we can now move onto the jaw. Now the jaw is the other major skeletal joint of the head and typically I like to do this with a joint. So when we create a jaw joint you do want to make sure that you align it with the jaw of the character. So you know, if you kind of can feel on your own face, you'll realize that the jaw hinge is somewhere in front of the ear, somewhere along here. Now every character's going to be different but you do need to place that joint anatomically so that way it deforms properly. So for this character I'm going to go back into my side view and I'm going to draw a joint chain. Now I'm going to draw it separately from the joint chain I just drew and we'll connect it in later. So for this character the jaw is probably going to be somewhere around here kind of a little bit below and forward of the ear. So I'm going to go ahead and place it here. Just left click. And then the second joint you want to kind of place somewhere around the chin or towards the top of the chin. Now typically I like to draw it a little bit outside of the character, and that makes it easy to see when I'm in this mode. And sometimes I like to be able to select this joint. And if you want to see all the joints you can certainly turn on x-ray joints to see how those are aligned. Now as with the other joints we do need to name them so let's do that in the outliner. So let's call this joint jaw one. And the second one is basically just going to be called joint jaw two. Now these will be connected into this main skeleton so we want to connect it here under this head two connection. So I'm just going to go ahead and left click and middle drag under here. And notice how it draws another little joint. Now this is just an easy way to connect these. So when I rotate this all of these joints move together. And that's one reason why I drew this joint in the previous movie and that's so I have a place to connect all of these joints. Now with these joints in place you probably could move onto skinning but we're going to add a few more joints for the upper part of the face.

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