Facial control panel

Here it is, my first ever attempt at a facial control interface. It's pretty basic as you can tell, but its still a big step forward from my last rig. The attribute to switch the visibilty on and off is located on the head controller, as highlited in the image. You can see roughly how it works from the playblast; the eyebrows rotate and move up and down with individual sliders for the left, right and mid sections of each; the mouth can be moved from eather side, and in the middle is a slider for the open/close/wide/narrow. I colour coded the curves and locators as appropriate, and also made unnecissary attributes un-keyable. All of the controls are parented to the outer circle, which is in turn parented to the head controller to allow for it to follow the movement of the head. For some reason blendshapes for the eyes would not work, so instead of struggling trying to work out why I simply made some circles in front of the eyes with a blink attribute connected to the scaleY of the geometery, and this works fine.

As I said, it's pretty basic material, but I learnt a heck of a lot through doing this. I learnt how to use the expression editor to connect attributes, and how limit information can effect this. I.e. setting the limit info to -1 to 1 will create a reverse of the blendshape when linked with an expresion. I had a fair bit of difficulty with creating the blendshape sliders without one heavily effecting the other, but I sent out a quick E-mail to Alex and he swiftly helped; it's vital to connect all of the shapes you need to use to the morph target in one go, otherwise maya registers them as seperate targets and will attempt to fill in the difference even when you don't want it to. It's very difficult to explain through words.

Either way I'm glad I'm done with blendshapes for now. I started painting weights as well today, but halfway through I pressed Ctrl Z to undo, and Maya thought this meant i wanted to close the programme without saving. Never mind though, I'll do it tomorrow.