Asking for help in finding a Maya tutorial... So for quite some time, I've been making facial rigs in Motionbuilder, and now looking at transitioning some of this to Maya (where I'm a total noob) as my good facial mocap tools that did support mobu are about to expire, sigh... So what I do in mobu, is create dummy objects with custom properties that match the blendshapes of whatever character I'm going to use (in this case, Daz characters..) I then build complex relational constraints with macros and whatnot to connect the movement of the rig objects to the blendshape dummies.. The end result is a rig that I can drop in on any character and the only thing I need to do is make connections between the dummy objects custom properties and the object mesh blendshapes. Never having done this in Maya, I don't even know where to start, so I'm asking any of my Maya animator friends out there if they know of specific tutorials I can look at to replicate this. Eventually, I want to take the next step and create a similar rig in UE, so I can go back and forth like with metahumans. Thanks for your help
Hi. You will find wierd that such advanced soft like Maya don't have any Custom Macros builder system. So it's kind of pain in the ass to build connections by hands using standard nodes (nodes works the same like in Mobu). To start rebuilding your facial panel rigs in maya, you have 2 options. Do it by hand - to get to know how to work with maya nodes. Or go with Python and do your own Node - plugins (Macros). If you are not expert in python than you can try go with GPT, you can easly learn how to write your custon nodes - and you will do it much faster than searching in internet.
If is just blend shapes, a simple MEL or Python script ( that you can loop for each blend shape for matching) will help to make the connections between the dummy object and the blend shape name. I used to do a similar matching in UE, where I used a proxy joint rig that will store 0-to-1 blend shape values from ARKit, that I will then export from Unreal and import into Maya. From there I would use a script to match the joint value to the blend shape I rig I have in Maya.
Hey Bryan, I'm happy to connect and show you how you could do that.
Can you elaborate a little more on why you want to move from Mobu to Maya?
Senior Animation Technical Artist at Build A Rocket Boy
7moYou have a lot more control in Maya with building node networks, and serialising the data. Utilising Bifrost should also help in terms of creating compounds. As long as you understand the node networks you want to create, the issue is just a translation problem. I'd take a look at any tutorials that teach basic commands to create and connect nodes using the python commands module, as well as any introductory tutorials on using the Bifrost interface in Maya.