This is a tutorial setting up a Facial rig Jason Osipa style within Max 7. I strongly advise everyone to purchase the book “Stop Staring” by Jason Osipa. It goes over a rather innovative approach to lip synching. It also goes over modeling and edge loops for good lip synching deformation. Even though the book is for Maya the principles travel across all major 3d packages.
I used the parametric head creator by Bruce Forel. It is a great script for people to begin modeling heads. I dont personally use the script, but I found it very helpful for the purpose of demonstrating this tutorial. Check out his script here
Things you will need before you start
First you will need a head with the morpher modifier already on it and hopefully a couple of targets already loaded into morpher…at least 4 so you can see the real benefits of the rig. Here is a file the has 4 morph targets set up so you can test out the exercise. The morph targets are:
Right_smirk - Left_smirk - Mouth_open - Mouth_pout
Second Rig Tools script. My friend “Phatdaddy” (Walter Osborn) wrote a script that automates the controller creation for the face rig. The rig controller is based off “Rigman” (Alvaro Sanint) controller Phatdady's Rig Tools script
This tutorial is also possible to do with the Joystick Manipulator by Borislav Petrov (not nescassary for this tutorial) http://www.scriptspot.com/bobo/
Open your scene with the morpher head in it
1a. Click on Rig Tools and type in “Mouth” in the name slot under “ Parameters ”
Pay close attention to the default Units. The Width and Height are set to 5 units. This will come up later on.
Click in the front viewport to create it
2a. Go to the “ Animation ” menu and select “ Reaction Manager ”
3a. In the reaction window click the “ Add Master ” button in the top left
4a. While in “ Add Master ” mode, click on the controller circle “ Mouth_circ ” Then go to Tranform – FK Sub_control – Position – X Position. This will add the master ( Mouth_circ / X Position ) in the “ Reactions
