Mudbox Maya

[Mohammed Faerber]

Whenmaking my blendshapes I prefer working with Mudbox rather than ZBrush. The only reason is the ease of integration with Maya.

As Maya and Mudbox both are from Autodesk, and both have their free educational versions available to download and use, I just ended up working with Mudbox. I am sure a similar workflow can be established to work with ZBrush as well.

1) Open maya scene file and duplicate the base head geometry. You will be making all your blendshapes to this duplicated head. Hide your original model by adding it into a layer if you want.

2) Make another duplicate of this head and name it mudboxHead. We will use this head to make all our blendshapes. I do this because, for whatever godOnlyKnows reason, if the workflow between mudbox and maya gets screwed up, I do not want it to affect my target head.

Remember! 3 heads are better than 1

3) select the mudbox head and navigate in Maya to File-> send to Mudbox -> send as new scene. (I assume that you have mudbox installed)

4) When the file opens in mudbox, you will see it centered in the screen. Hit A on keyboard to frame it.

5) If you have not used mudbox before, fear not. It is a blend of Maya and Photoshop and really easy to pick up. To your right, you will see layers. We are going to use these layers to do all our shapes. I wont go into the details of mudbox basics. You can get that from other tutorials online. I will assume you have a decent knowledge of the interface of mudbox.

6) to your right, you will see the face as a base layer. Lets create a new layer and call it BrowNearDown. thats the shape we are going to create.

Creating the shape itself:

1) I use the freeze tool to freeze areas I know are not going to be affected by the shape. I like this tool as it gives me a clear visual representation of whats being affected and whats not. I can also get a gradient of the affect by freezing the area partially. So, as the first step, lets select the Freeze tool and from brush settings, choose Flood to freeze the entire face. And then lets hold down CTRL button or from brush settings choose InvertFunction and then paint out the area that we want to influence.

7) I always feel this stage of getting a shapes is probably more closer to a realistic character. Get it to shape how your eyebrows move. Now its time to create a new layer and increase the poly subdivision by 2 levels and start sculpting to exaggerate the expression. In the second layer we just created, just experiment with how much more you can push the shape. Do not go into finer details. Once satisfied, hit PageDwn twice to go back to subdivion 0 to see the changes.

Change of shape:

The shape I am ultimately trying to get to is the brow scrunch down/squeeze. As I said, we need 3 shapes to add up to do this. We have just built the first of these shapes. We will now build the second, brow forward.

1) Make a new layer in the same scene file. As discussed in the sculpting steps above, sculpt out the brow fwd shape, while still keeping the visibility of the brow down shape ON.

2) I will make another layer for the brow Squeeze shape and do the exact same steps.

notice how to get the brows to squeeze together I selected my freeze brush and painted the center line of the brow flowing into the nose, That way, I preserved its position and using the grab tool moved one side of the brow closer to get the squeeze. I also added some details in a higher poly layer.

Extracting the shapes:

If you are still reading this, then you are pretty serious about learning this stuff ?

so lets move on. We have all the perfect eyebrow squeeze shape by the addition of the 3 shapes. Now to get them all into maya as separate shapes.

There are two ways to do this.

NOTE:

it is good to make additional shapes here. Like if you want the squeeze shape with a greater emphasis to be used in a very powerful scene, then make that as a separate shape. You can always add that shape ON when needed.

Select all the new shapes created in mudbox, then the mudboxhead and create a blendshape. Test to see if all the shapes are working as needed. Its a good idea to test this in smooth mode. You will see problems with the shapes easily and mostly might have to go back and forth between mudbox and maya a little bit to get it right. If you do feel like a particular shape needs to be toned down, adjusting the layers opacity in mudbox will not work. This is because, when you send the model ot maya, it is sent with full opacity. So, you will have to sculpt down the layer manually. Thankfully, this is very easy to do. Select your erase tool in maya. and start painting. It basically erases the change you have done on that layer on parts that you are painting. To partially erase away, use the freeze brush first and paint with a faint opacity. That way you can get the erase brush to work in gradients.

Mine looks something like this when all this is done.

In more detail:

1)Select the mudboxHead and then go to paintblendShapeWeihts tool. If you did that right, your model will turn white. In the tool settings, you will see the name of the blendshape node and the blendshapes listed. Select the node. and in Value of brush, set to ZERO, and opacity to 100, click on Flood. the face turns black and will look like the default shape. No matter what you do with the slider, its not going to change shape.

2) hit W or go into a component mode. In front view, select verts from only one side of the face. Do not select also the center line. Go back to PaintBlendShapeWeights tool. now change value to 1 and Flood again.

So, its good to know both the techniques. I prefer using the script to get the other side. just because I can take a break and let the computer do all the work. I can email you the script I wrote to get the blendshapes mirrored. Its in beta stage. It works perfectly, but I have not developed a GUI for it yet. You just need to select all shapes you need to mirror, then the base shape and run the script. Come back in about 15 minutes(depending on number of shapes to mirror) and all your 40 odd shapes will be mirrored with an offset and renamed accordingly.

I don't know much about the software so had a bit of a play/test to see if all was working, as best as I could make out. All seemed to be Ok. A colleague then had a look and managed to get Mudbox to prompt a message requesting Accessibility control.

Having discovered this, I logged a support ticket with Autodesk who came back with this link to a similar issue with Maya ( -forum/maya-crashes-on-mojave/m-p/8340995) in that you needed to allow Maya control under Accessibility settings. This is a manual process.

Wanting to look into this from a large-scale perspective, I discovered that this apparently all came under the PPPC umbrella. I then downloaded JAMF PPPC utility where I created a configuration profile for Mudbox, uploaded to JAMF and deployed. However, where there had previously been a Mudbox entry listed under Security & Privacy > Accessibility, this was now not there with the apparent successfully deployed Config Profile in place?

@SirSir is correct. Applying a Configuration Profile for Privacy Protection Policy Control (PPPC) doesn't change the appearance in System Preferences. Profiles override settings on macOS but they don't alter settings. If you remove a profile, the existing settings come back to life.

If you find you have a profile that doesn't appear to work, you may be looking as something like a sub-application (buried within the primary application bundle) or a secondary application that was installed somewhere else. For those, you can right-click or Control-click the requesting app in the list and choose Show In Finder to reveal it.

I'm not sure if this is the right way or even covnentional way, but I have created a profile allowing Mudbox access to System Preferences and a retrospective option of System Preferences having access to Mudbox.

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Sorry the bones joint things in Mudbox are not exportable, they aren't real bones like the bones are in Max or Maya, mudbox joints are more like the deformer modifier in 3ds Max. Sorry its not that u are missing anything its just how Mudbox works sorry, I also tryed a similar thing but it didn't work for me either. So don't worry.

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