Intention
I am examining facial modeling and model manipulation for my folio 1. For my studio project, I would like to develop a tool in Autodesk Maya that helps modelers, riggers and animators to create simple to complex rigs, for both animations and games, and be able to export rigs into Unity and Unreal Engine, if needed.
Field
My work for folio 1 mainly sits within 3D character modeling, but the main purpose of me learning how to create facial models and manipulate them is to be able to create some amazing facial rig setups.
For facial modeling and expressions, I was looking at the work of Leticia Gillett (leticiagillett.com), a character dev artist at Netflix Animation and Duc (Phil) Nguyen (aeskawa.artstation.com), a freelance character artist. They both are amazing artists and have a variety of character models in their portfolio. Duc has done some amazing real-life head models and Leticia has created a lot of cartoony models with beautiful expressions. These two among many others are some of the best character modelers in the industry.
Conceptual, Technical, Craft and Management
The tool that I am looking to create for my Studio project is going to have a segment with FACS based facial rigging, which is mostly based on creating different expressions of a model and combining them to create a facial rig. For this part of the process, I’ll be creating expression for the model by manipulating the main face model and adding in what’s necessary to make it look good. And learning how to do that in Folio 1 is going to help me during my Studio project. By the end of Folio 1, I hope to be able to create a rigging ready head model with good topology and some facial expression to go with it.
Tools
I will be working with Autodesk Maya, Zbrush and Autodesk Mudbox to find out the best software to create and manipulate facial models. Firstly, I’ll be creating a base head model in Maya with good topology and exporting into Zbrush to add more details to the model. Then I’ll export the finished model to Mudbox to try and manipulate the model to create different expressions. This way I’ll get familiar with both Zbrush and Mudbox and by the end of Folio 1, I should be able to decide which software would be the best for my purposes.
I will try and spend 1 week on each of these steps, week 3 would be spent in Maya creating the base model with good facial topology. Then week 4 would be spent working in Zbrush and I’d spend the last week in Mudbox to create different facial expressions.