Hyper-real Facial Rigging

Gonna spend some time on the CGTalk Unofficial Rigging Challenge 2 on a hyper-real facial rig.

Did a few things:
- Some basic setting up of head/neck/eye joints
- Simple rigging of the eyes via aim constraints
- First pass skinning of geometry to the head, neck and jaw joints



Ideas:
- Since it is a hyper-real rig, I will be tuning my rig towards pseudo-muscle setup.
- Idea is to have a base head that is blendshaped to the actual renderable head, with all the rigging and extra stuff done on that base head. So the actual head will be "clean".
- Rig will be entirely made up of joints. Will add in some blendshapes if time allows.
- There will be a facial interface beside the face made up of curves for the controls, with on-face controls to fine tune the face if needed.

AutoRig Step 3 - Creating the actual rig joints

I re-worked the Joints Guide file a bit more after rethinking about the spine rig I'm going to do. Also changed a few naming conventions on the guide. Here's the updated file bipGuide.ma.

Spent some more time in rethinking the joint orientations of joints, how they should move and whether some joints are needed. Also noticed that the usual joint orientation functions, or even Comet's, could not really orient the finger joints well because of the way the finger joints are positioned. In this case, after the initial creation of the joints, I would need to go in and tweak the finger orientations manually.

Here's the result:


And here's the default Maya skinning on the model. Notice the extra shoulder joint provides a good default skinning to start with in the shoulder/deltoid areas. The upper spine area is not that flexible in real life bipeds, so only 3 joints are used for that area. More on that later.