Catwoman Rigging process

   The rigging process focused more on facial elements.The method used is divided in two parts.

 I have used an auto-rigger program which rigged the and skinned the body and the face was riggged by me following a tutorial on blend shaped based facial rigging.

First, I chose the auto rigging for the body because it was faster and straight forward and I have managed to save much more time focusing on the face. The autorigger is named Mixamo and it is actually a website on which users can upload their model and choose where the main joints are placed. After this process the users can download the model and a script for Maya.

Here is the model after the joints have been attached.  

Below is the the result of the autorigging process. The controls are basic: FK controls for the hips and spine and head, for the legs and hand there is also a switch between IK and FK.

It can be seen that the using the autorigger didn't create controls for the face, just for the head to be rotated.

The red joints are created by me. I have parented the root of them with the joint already created for the head. Because I could not create another skin, I had to find a method to add the influences from the new joints and not disturb the influences from the rest of the joints (mostly for the neck area).

This was a difficult process because it required a lot of testing and painting skin on each part.

I have created a main control for the face, attaching 3 more curves for the eyes and for the mouth. The main control has some custom attributes for the eyes like blinking and rotating. The two controls for the eyes are just for translating, and the mouth control has the phoneme attributes from the blend shapes. I have also created controls for rotating the ears, jaw, tongue, teeth and nose, and created some blend shapes to move different parts up and down for the eyebrows, lids and lips (the circles around them in the picture below are the controls).

I have also used some expressions in order to make the eye movement more organic, attaching to the rotation of the eyeball joint 50% of the rotation of the lids so that they would move together.