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
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