Images and videos are good, but nothing beats a real face, since you can see and feel what is moving and when. As a rigger, you need to be able to cut the expressions into smaller pieces and create a rig that is intuitive for the animator to use, without making it unnecessarily complex.

So to understand how to animate certain expressions, you need to study them and understand them. For a smile, for example, it is not enough to have just the mouth move. The face moves a lot when doing any kind of expression. I usually start texturing faces in ZBrush while sculpting, and then move to Photoshop and Substance Painter. Adding color variations in the texture is something that makes faces seem more interesting in my opinion: even adding wilder colors like green and purple works very nicely and makes the skin feel more alive. I kept textures quite nonexistent or simple since the main goal was the rigging. Jose’s course for facial rigging at CGMA seemed like a great opportunity to get back into the game since for me faces seemed the most complex area to tackle, and character expressions are very important in all kinds of situations.

It had been quite many years since I had done rigging in Maya, so I needed a refresher! I did 3D as a hobby and after high school, I got into another school where I did my assignments well enough for a teacher to recommend me to the biggest 3D studio in Finland at the time.īecause my job got more focused on character work at Piñata, and we wanted to move our character pipeline to Maya from 3ds Max, it felt like a good idea to enroll in a course on rigging in Maya. I got interested in 3D all the way back in 1995 when I saw the first Toy Story movie. At the moment, we handle a lot of video game marketing materials. Nowadays, I do mostly 3D character modeling and TD work. For a long time, I worked as a 3D generalist, also doing some compositing and TD work, before coming to work for Piñata in Helsinki. I've worked on three 3D feature animations that were among the first animated films made in Finland, and hundreds of TV commercials and visualizations.

I've worked in the Finnish 3D animation industry in various roles for around 14 years. Hello, I am Sakari Hakkarainen, a 3D artist from Finland.

Rigged character for maya