Digital Tutors – Creating Facial Expressions in Mudbox and Maya 2011 [repost]

In this series of lessons, we will learn some of the tools and techniques you can use to build facial expressions and phoneme shapes for your characters.


Creating characters with expressive faces is often a very important part of our 3D projects. Depending on the type of character, you may need to communicate a great deal through the expression on its face. Facial expressions relay a lot of non-verbal information about our characters and Mudbox can make creating those expressions really easy and a lot of fun. In this course, we’ll talk about several concepts to keep in mind when building facial expressions, such as the muscles of the face, how the skin reacts when the muscles move it into an expression and some important tips to keep in mind when working. We’ll cover methods in Mudbox for sculpting different expressions and how to use sculpt layers to create an extremely flexible workflow. Finally, we’ll look at a couple of ways that we can get our expressions into Maya in order to set up animatable blendshapes. Once done, you’ll have a better understanding of how you can use Mudbox and Maya to create appealing facial expressions for your own characters.

Lesson Outline (14 lessons)
1. Introduction and Project Overview
2. Expression Sculpting Concepts
3. Sculpting a happy expression
4. Sculpting a sad expression
5. Sculpting an angry expression
6. Sculpting a look of surprise
7. Blending multiple expressions with sculpt layer masking
8. Building an expression library using sculpt layers
9. Finishing the expression library
10. Combining expression layers to create variation
11. Sculpting the ‘E’ phoneme
12. Sculpting the ‘B’ phoneme
13. Outputting sculpt layers as blendshapes automatically
14. Setting up blendshapes manually in Maya