A bunch of things we learned this time around

First off, be very careful about where u put your nasolabial fold topology. It should go from the ala of the nose to very near the corner of the mouth. Super important, you wont be able to get a good mouth corner movement.

If you want to make accurate multi piece eyes, make sure that your eyelid thickness touches the surface of the outer eye but doesnt go in. Use a rotation deformer if you can.

Micro Sculpts First

After some thinking, I think we should only do one off sculpts for the micro rig. No combo sculpts or macro sculpts until we start building the macro rig. We dont have the time to make mistakes with the sculpts and redo them. Once the macro rig is done we can see exactly which macro sculpts we need to build.

Firing Order

Firing Order is important enough to get its own post.


If you fire something first, it will move in relation to the things that come after. So if you fire your lip FB first, then rotate your jaaw they will not move forward, but will move at a diagonal along the rotation of the jaw.

Basically if you fire something second then it will move just as u expect it. If u tell it forward, it will go forward. Around a curve, it will go around a curve.

I need to do a lot of testing before I figure out the best firing order for Mindy. There are a lot of clusters. :)

If something looks funky with your weights but you think they should be right, check your firing order.

Notes On A-Pose

K, looking back, A-pose probably wasn't worth it for this project. But, it was a great learning experience.

After talking with Dallin about the IK wrist controls orientations, I think we built the IK arm's incorrectly. We built the IK's at an angle, but I think we should have built the IK in t-pose, and used the control to move the bones into position on the character.

Well, live and learn.

Notes on building the Three Curve Principle inside of Maya

Hope this is a useful reference for you guys. These are tips and tricks and problems that you will run into as you are building your facial rig using the three curve principle. They are in no particular order, I'm just typing em as my brain thinks of em.


- Rotation Orders. Are super important. If your cluster is flipping, change the rotation orders until you get one that doesn't flip. I can't believe we never figured this out on ram's horn. Lol, we were super lucky that most of our clusters worked on our curves.
- Nurbs Surfaces K, if u are using the pointOnCurveInfo node and an aim node to attach your loc to the curve, know that nurbs curves flip if they are in an s. That is just the way they are. They interpolate their normals based on where the control verts are (in my limited understanding), and so they will flip the normals if the curve snakes. This is a problem cause we use the normals and the tangents to get our locs rotations. So, to fix, if u need an s curve use a Nurbs surface and a pointonsurfaceinfo node. Their normals are adjustable and predictable.
- Firing Orders This is super important. SUPER important. Not only is it necessary to have the FB firing before the LR, mouthcorner LR, etc, so that your forward back will stay perpendicular to the face, but it is important to have all of your mids firing before your inns, and outs. If your left fires, then your mid, then your out, all of your clusters will be biased toward the left side. (Note, this is mostly only important on clusters that are rotated. If they are all oriented exactly the same, I dont think it makes a difference.)
- Quick Sets Super useful for quickly hiding everything but your one to one zones.
- Component Editor This guy is the only way u can make this method work inside of maya. Painting cluster weights crashes my scene every time, and you get more precise values with the component editor anyways. Go to the weighted deformer tab, shift or control select the verts u wanna move, and then use the scroll bar at the bottom of the window to adjust them. Super nice. Combo that with the lasso tool and an intuos, and u can go pretty fast.
- Left, Right, Mid When setting up your weights, do the left side one to one, then mirror that to the right side one to one. Put both those to a value of one, and now you can make your mid. Once the mid is there, mung all your controls and test them. They will be off. That is when you iterate. Left, right, mid, check everything, left, right, mid. Do that for the one to one, and then once that is perfect use the same method for your falloffs.
-Draw on the screen Brian Tindall recommends this, and it really does help. Use a dry erase marker, it comes off. This allows you to really quickly hit your curves.
-Cluster Handles matter not at all It is only their pivot point that matters. Put the handle wherever it is easy to select, but makes SURE that your pivots are in the right spots.

Anyways, good luck