Hulk vs Thanos fan film - Hulk Face Rig - WIP 01 - Eyes & Brows
Channel: anthony mcgrath
Date: 2020-01-14

hi all

first of all - please dont ask me when is it ready - i dont know lol!  :p
(I am working on a trailer though)

Anyone following me on Youtube and keeping up to date on my community page will probably see that i've been updating it with various Thanos and Hulk images gifs & info and other wafflings.  I've been working on a personal project involving these two leviathans duking it out.. because we all got robbed by Endgame when Hulk didn't get a rematch.  So sack it... i'll do it my blinking self!!!
Theres a gigantic glut of work going forward not least of which is actually building these two characters - both have been done extremely well for the Infinity Saga films especially.  I cant hope to compete with the big vfx studios who spend millions on this stuff but it keeps me entertained in the evenings (too late sometimes.. 1am last night!)

Anway i thought i would share a few videos that demonstrate a bit more of the tech side as i work on them.  I've done a couple of small vids for Thanos so i thought its about time i did one for Hulk as i begin work on the face rig.

This video demonstrates a super simple setup for the eyes and brows.  However one cool trick i learned is the use of "hooks" - which let you connect your character up to an 'intermediary' node which is then driven by your control rig.  Its rather cool and lets you re-use stuff and re-iterate on changes fairly easily in a more non-destructive manner... as opposed to directly hooking controllers into the blendshapes themselves which can get very messy.  You can read more on it here:
https://rigmarolestudio.com/blendshape_hooks/

In the video you can see i pretty much drop all anim on layers - the base animlayer has barely any anim on it (note the anim is VERY rudimentary its just for testing purposes).  I find this works really well for facial anim especially - keeping brows on one layer, eyes another and mouth on another - it lets you dial in the amount you need or tweak them in isolation :)

Also yes... maya 2015.5 - it still rocks :p  I'll update when i have money lol.

I've got a heap more face shapes to put together for Hulk (most of which are built but need tweaks) and then got to hook them into the control rig - the mouth is especially difficult.. head-bangingly so.  I got a fairly decent first pass on Thanos so hopefully it'll work well for this guy too!

I will endeavour to get some tutorials going down the line where i can hopefully talk about what i'm doing... also apologies... my mouse cursor wasn't recorded with this video grr.

cheers
Ant