Facial Animation Setup - Game Character Development with Maya - page 818

FIGURE 13.10 Move the joints for the lips slightly outward from the mouth.
Because we fully weighted them to the jaw and head joints, the vertices around the
mouth are being told to ignore the lip joints. Let's attend to this next.
3. With a softer brush and a smaller Opacity value (say, 0.10 ), start to add weight-
ing information for just the left three lip joints. Make the vertices on the inside of
her lips almost fully affected by the joints, with the influence gradually fading as
you get farther from the mouth. This will cause the lips to flatten slightly as they
part, just as they would do naturally.
As you are adding the weights, you will see the lips begin to open up, with the ver-
tices moving gradually toward the joint you are working on ( Figure 13.11b ).
FIGURE 13.11 Add weighting to the lip joints
4. When you are happy with the weights, you can mirror them across to the joints on
the right side of her mouth. First, though, you have to reset the joints back to their
default position; if they are not reset, the weights will not mirror properly. In this
case, it's as simple as returning to frame 0.