Head Rigging in Autodesk Maya

Want to become an animator? If you already have Autodesk Maya, jump right in! In this series, you’ll learn how to animate the different elements of a head rig.

Ready to add the jaw joints to your head rig? In this Autodesk Maya lesson on rigging, you'll learn the correct way to create jaw joints - and how not to do it.

Want to add some movement to your head? In this rigging lesson, you'll learn how to set up the head joints on your skeleton, starting with the root joint.

What are constraints? These connect joints to controllers. In this Maya lesson, we'll use parent and orient constraints to control the translation and rotation.

You've created a bunch of joints in your head rig, but leaving them as "joint 1" and "joint 2" is not a good practice. Let's rename them using the outliner.

Now it's time to add the facial controllers to your rig. Using NURBS Primitives, we'll create the head, chest, neck and jaw controls and freeze transform them.

In this Maya lesson, you'll learn how to parent controllers so your rig moves naturally. For example, when you move the neck, you'll want the head to move, too.

In this Maya lesson from Animation Methods, learn how to apply your model to its joints, adjust deformations, and begin to explore weight painting.

Getting the movement of your neck to appear realistic is no easy task. In this Maya animation lesson, learn how to fine-tune head and neck weighting.

Open your mouth and say, "Ahhh!" This Maya lesson from Animation Methods shows you how to make your model’s jaw joint fully functional using weighting tools.

Take the next step to get realistic mouth movement on a head model in Maya. In this lesson, learn to get the upper and lower teeth to move independently.

It’s time to get your model to smile! In this lesson, you learn how to blend shapes to animate your model’s expressions using vertex mode in Maya.

Get into the nitty gritty of animating a model in Maya! In this lesson, learn to create blink blend shapes for the eyes, and set up controllers for animation.

At this point, you’ve made a ton of blend shapes and controllers for the model. Now, learn how to clean up your work so you can pass it on to an animator.

Now that your model’s expressions are mapped in Maya, it’s time to create controls! In this lesson, create a custom controller for facial expression animation.

Animation Methods demonstrates how to set up phonemes in Maya. Learn how to set up controllers for phonemes, how to add attributes, and how to record poses.

The smile, neutral and frown states of the model are set. Now, it’s time to calibrate an animator-friendly slider in Autodesk Maya to control blend shapes.

In this Maya rigging lesson from Animation Methods, learn how to make a blend shape to animate an “A” sound, represented by “eɪ̯~e” in the phonetic alphabet.

Now that the jaws and mouth are moving, build controllers for eye movement. In this lesson, learn to create and calibrate eye controllers in Autodesk Maya.