From the course: Maya: Facial Rigging

Modeling mouth shapes - Maya Tutorial

From the course: Maya: Facial Rigging

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Modeling mouth shapes

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- [Instructor] Let's go ahead and start modeling some blend shapes. We're going to start with the corners of the mouth. Now before I model anything, I want to protect my neutral shape here, so if I select my head here you'll see its head neutral, and I've already zeroed out my transforms, so if you haven't done that just go ahead and just do a freeze transforms. And I'm going to select this and just move this over to the side here. So now that I've moved it over I'm going to duplicate it. So I'm going to go edit, duplicate or you can hit control D. And now I have a second copy of this and because everything was zeroed out all I have to do is type in zero into my translate X and now I'm working on a copy of my master. And, again, this protects my neutral. So I'm going to go ahead and rename this, let's go ahead and call this head smile. So now that we have this we can start to model. Now when I model, I want to model symmetrically so I'm going to go ahead and open up my modeling tool kit here and let's turn on symmetry for object x. And go into vertex mode and as you can see, when I select one side it selects the other. Now we are going to be modelling symmetrical shapes, and it makes sense to actually model them at the same time. So if I always have symmetry turned on, hopefully everything will model properly. So what we want to do is we want to create the smile shape so I'm going to select say some of these vertices here, and for this particular part of the mouth you do want to make sure you turn on soft select. Now it depends on your model as to how much you want this to move, but you also want to make sure that instead of volume you turn on surface. So if I had volume turned on and I select say, this part of the lip, it's going to select the upper lip as well and I don't want that, I want it to go along the surface of the model so this way, when I select the upper lip, it doesn't affect the lower lip at all, unless it's kind of close to the corner of the mouth here where they kind of converge. So I'm going to select a couple of these vertices and what we want to do is just start modeling, so I want to model what the character looks like when he is just smiling. So we can start to move these vertices up and into the corner there. If I want to I can expand my vertices to get a little bit more. And as you can see, we're kind of pushing that up into the cheeks, but I'm also getting a little bit of movement here you can kind of see the teeth poking through and I don't really want that. Now I want to keep this very, very contained so that it's really just moving that portion of the mouth that I want to move, so for the corner of the mouth we can do that but we also can stretch this a little bit so I can start to expand. Now you also have to remember the volume of the characters so as it's moving up and out it will also move back a little bit. And it will also tend to puff out the cheeks just a little bit so we can actually push those cheeks up. So, again what we're trying to do is just get those corners of the mouth into the right position. Now this is just going to be a sculptural problem so, we're going to have a lot of back and forth with this so I'm going to go ahead and tweak these a little bit and then we'll come back.

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