Facial Animation Setup - Game Character Development with Maya - page 814

We will leave binding the rest of the body until Chapter 14 . For now, let's concentrate on
the job at hand and edit the weighting information on the face.
Joint Weights
Since we covered the various weighting tools and options in Chapter 6 , we can now get
right to it and work on the facial joints.
Note
Unless specified, we will mainly be using the paint operation Replace,
from the Paint Weights pane in the Paint Skin Weights options.
Wewillbemovingthejointsaround,soitwouldbeprudentforustofirststoretheircurrent
translations.Sincethejoints'translationscannotbefrozen,wewillsetakeyframeonthem,
thus storing their default pose.
Figure 13.6 shows the Time Slider at the bottom of the Maya window (the main bar with
numbersinit).ThiscontrolstimeinMaya;simplyclickinginthesliderwillaltertheframe
you're on. We will discuss the Time Slider in more detail in Chapter 16 , “ Animating for
Games . ”
FIGURE 13.6 The Time Slider
On the Time Slider, make sure you have frame 0 selected; then select all the joints associ-
ated with the face. Right-click in the Channel Box and select Key All from the menu. The
attributes will turn orange to indicate they are keyframed. We have thus stored the joints'
positionsatframe0;youwillbeabletoseeathinredlineindicatingthattheselectedobject
has a key set on it. We can still move the joints around, but to return them to their default