Brand New Facial Rig

After posting the instructions on how I made the old facial rig I designed, I decided that I would re-design it. I had already taken some of the 11 Second Club's models for my students to rig, since they're such nice models and work so well for animation and facial animation. The geometry is also clean and simple enough that they're easy for my students to work with. I like the model that they designed for the club, and after stripping the rig out of the model in Maya, I exported the model as an .obj to 3ds Max.

I started it by adding some shapes where I wanted deformation, I added some helpers and constrained them using position constraints and look-at constraints. I liked how it was moving, and then I walked away and slept on how I was going to hook all that up to some kind of interface that would make it easier for an animator to work with. The next day, yesterday, I got back to work on it, and had the brilliant idea of using a Position List with multiple XYZ Positions instead of using a ton of helper nodes. That in and of itself made the rig much smaller, with much fewer nodes.

If you're interested in more details about how I did this, some of it is similar to the tutorial I posted earlier, or just drop me a line.

Facial Rig for 3ds Max

Inspired by Jason Osipa

I thought I would put this tutorial that I did for a facial rig online. It's a little old, and probably could be improved upon, but it worked well, including working for export to the Gamebryo Game Engine.

The tutorial can be found here (.pdf format)

Google Art Project

This is the most amazing thing ever and I am so excited about it.

http://www.googleartproject.com

Google is mapping museums the same way they've mapped all the streets. You can walk through and see works of art in great detail. They've not mapped the entire National Gallery in London yet, so they've not made it to my favorite piece which is Meindert Hobbema's Avenue at Middelharnis, but I'm sure they'll get there eventually. This would have been a great tool to have when I took Art History. It was often hard to find works of art, and when you did, they were often a little black and white picture in a book. Check it out.