Making of Lensha by Loocas Duber, Czech Republic (Europe)


Rigging and Skinning

Rigging and skinning was the next step in this project. Again, I didn’t have to fully rig and skin the character for this particular render, but since I’m planning to animate her for my showreel, I wanted to have a full control over the head’s main features, such as the jaw, eyes, neck and some facial expressions. You can see I used standard Max’s bones. I used two main bones for the neck and the head to move freely, which were constrained to a circular controller.



Then I used a bone for each of the eyelids, upper and lower ones. This was because I wanted to avoid using morph for subtle details such as winking or blinking. Also, this enables me to create an automated eyelids system that reacts to the direction in which the eyes are looking. Take a look at the images; you can see that whenever I move with the main eyes controller, the eyelids react to the change by moving along with the eye. This was achieved very easily using the expose transform helper, from which I derived the particular data of the eyeballs that were rigged to the main eyes controller.







The jaw was even simpler to setup, it’s again, consisted of only two bones, that are constrained to a spherical helper for fine detail in animation. This entire setup resulted in a fully interactive, basic, head setup. Once done, I went onto skinning the character to the bones. I used the standard skin modifier in Max and with the help of blend weights; it was a breeze getting the finest details done, such as the corners of the mouth or the neck. For the facial expressions I created a few morph targets that I’m still planning to expand for greater versatility in facial expressions of the character, however, for the purpose of this illustration, I got away with just a very few basic ones. The frown, smile, cheeky smile and open mouth, as I could describe them. I’m planning to release a basic rigging video tutorial on my site soon, so stay tuned, if you’re interested in more detailed process! :)