Creative and technical process: Week 29. Blend Shapes Maya

This week I made the process of creation and animation of the facial expressions of the characters. I used a very useful tool in the 3D artist's background, BlendShapes. This technique is used to deforme an object in a determine way from the original model. In this way, I first copied the face in its original state and the from the copy I modified it to create another facial expression, like moving the mouth. The BlendShape tool creates a shape transition between this two models, making the animation of the facial expression natural and fluid. The deformations of the objects are controlled by a controller for each specific area. I made an special effort for create a user interface to manage easily the movements of the face like eyebrows, eyes, etc. making the animation process easy. In this way, when the animator has to modified the mouth for example he doesn't has to go inside each component to modify it, instead he can do it from the user interface of controllers I made; also making possible make differentes movements like eyes and mouth at the same time.