Max to Maya
Snappers developed and created the initial facial rig, face rig picker, and facial dx11 shader working closely with the 2K Czech group. I came on board Hangar 13 Novato as that was being finalized. I was there during the migration of the facial rig from Max to Maya and started making sure the rig was game ready technically while 2K Czech kept advising on the visual aesthetics of each drop. After Snappers produced a few heads, production announced we would need to create 40 of these in a short time frame using outsourcing as well as in-house artists. I locked down a version of the rig. Automating the building and updating process became imperative for not only the cinematic heads but any of the 100 secondary heads we would require as well. With my Maya scripted automation, assets from any source could now be ingested, put through validations, and then be rebuilt into a game-ready rig quickly.
My updates to the Snappers facial rig:
Follicles were used to attach rig controls to an optimized version of deforming face geometry to speed up the frame rate. I worked with a tech artist from the Core Tech group on converting the rig expressions to Maya utility nodes for better performance using parallel evaluation. This node based setup would also allowed for the inclusion of more animator overrides for the rig logic. The rig logic was updated and modified to suit animator feedback in areas like the eyes and mouth.
Prototyping for the future:
Right before my transfer to WWE, I was in the process of introducing joints back into a face that was almost entirely blend shape driven, testing the drawbacks and advantages that that entailed. We started with the joints for the jaw, eyelids, and eye flesh. I was testing a new joint setup for the jaw to simulate more anatomically correct rotations and translations. We were implementing post mortem feedback to add more shapes and controls for the animators. I was creating prototypes for new wrinkle map, blood flow, and tension/pressure shader setups. We tested having the controls color coded for blend shapes being overdriven, keyframes being set, etc.