Creating a character to animate can be a lengthy process, but it is a very methodical and organized procedure. The first thing is to, of course, have an idea of what you want to build. If you are making a complicated character, particularly a clothed human, it helps to have a drawing of the front, side, and back of your character with its arms spread out, so you know what the character looks like from every angle. You can scan your drawings and put them in Maya so they can be a direct visual reference, (i.e. putting your front drawing in the front camera view, your profile drawing in the side camera view) and match your modeling to your exact pencil lines. In the case of the model pictured on the right, because of the relative simplicity, I worked off of a single drawing at a 3/4 angle, made by the designer of the character, that I just eyed on my desk while I modeled.

When you have a complicated character, again particularly a clothed human, it is best to find a way to separate the head and the body so you have an easier, less complicated process of building facial expressions later on. A good way to hide a separate head from a body, where there would be an obvious gap, is with a collar on the clothing, or a necklace, and with an animal character, maybe a ruff of fur, feathers, or a collar. But if there’s no way to get around it (you don’t want to ruin a design just for the sake of making things easier), it’s not necessary.

The creature I made picture on the right had a head that flowed directly into his body, so I made him all as one piece. Details also need to be in separate pieces, particularly the eyes so you can roll them around as their own objects inside your character’s head. It is best to create them early on so you can model your character’s head around the shape of the eyes. Here also are separate teeth, which due to their complicated nature are always best to make as two pieces (upper and lower teeth) and easy to set right inside a mouth pocket; a separate tongue, so you can animate it wiggling around on its own; and in the case of this character’s design, separate eyebrows (though in all other character’s I have carved them right into the head.)

To start modeling your body, head, or combination of both, you start with a polygonal cube. Before you start subdividing (adding more green lines passing through as a grid), pull the cube around into the basic shape of your character (in this case I made a peanut shape.) Then have at it and start adding spans, pulling out extrusions into arms and legs, making circular loops for eyes and mouth, all the while making sure you try to keep the individual faces of the character made up of four side squares (triangles are okay, but discouraged, since they can add pinching, and any shape more than four sides, called n-sided faces, will look unforgivably bad and should be removed immediately. This can be difficult, as your character grows more complicated with time.)

If you have never modeled a character before, it is best to look at references of how to structure the spans, since there is a very specific way to set up the geometry (on a bipedal character at least) so it will move correctly (like creating an “underwear” sort of look between your legs and torso so the pelvis looks correct when the legs are walking, with circular loops around the mouth and each eye so they will be able to open and close in a natural looking way.) And to make your life, much, much easier, it is best to make your character symmetrical, or if you have a separate head, at least the head symmetrical, for it cuts your work time in half when creating facial expressions, since you can just mirror over everything you’ve modeled on one side to the other.

Once your character is modeled, you need to prepare it for texturing (putting on colors and small surface details that are too delicate to model) by making UVs. UVs are points that lay out your 3D character as a 2D map, on which you can paint colors in Photoshop (though there are also ways to paint textures in 3D as well). If you do not make UVs you cannot put anything more exciting than one solid color on your character, and it’s also necessary to have nice UVs to be able to mirror the skin weights when rigging. Once you’ve UVed your character, you can texture and give your character more personality than the plain old default grey you’ve been looking at for far too long.

After that, it is time to put a rig in your model so you can make it move (if you notice in my picture, I’ve rigged before texturing. That’s fine, as long as you make sure you have nice UVs, which you’ll want for painting weights.) You can do all the rigging by hand in Maya if you have the skills, but for many people, it is best to use an outside plugin that will build the rig for you with all the controls you will need. Here I used The Setup Machine, a plug-in that is quite handy. When you start it up, and you request say, a bipedal character, it asks you how many fingers and toes you need and if the character has a tail and opposable thumbs. I enter I need a tail, two fingers, opposable thumbs, and two toes, and wha-la, I have everything I need for my creature model.

You take the bones and place them all where they need to go, press the rig button, and the automation gets to work on putting it in the model. Afterwards I can test it to make sure all the joints ended up in the right places. It won’t be pretty, but as long as the elbow still bends where an elbow should be, and all other joints do the same, then you can continue on making it look nice.

That’s where skin weights come in, designing how the “skin” of your character, the model, looks when you bend each joint, which is called painting skin weights. When I first rigged my character, his belly crumpled up when I bent the character’s knees, so I changed the weight of the skin on his stomach to be on his spine, instead of on his legs. When he turned his head, it crumbled up into a ball, so I painted all the weight of his head to be at the top joint of his head, and not weighted to his neck, which was causing his entire head to twist like a neck. After you go over the whole body, which will need touching up since the rigging program can’t predict what your character really looks like, you can start creating your facial expressions.

Facial expressions are known as blendshapes, because you will make several different heads programmed to blend seamlessly into your original head, or head/body combo if you have one singular piece, and make it look like your character changed expressions even though it’s just changing one model to look like another. You end up making at least over 50 different heads, duplicating each head off of your character and changing the vertices of it to be just a tiny bit different (one for the left eyelid 1/3 of the way closed, one for the left eyelid 2/3 of the way closed, one for the left eyelid closed, one for the left eyelid exaggeratedly open wide, and don’t forget all of that for the right side… one for the inner right side of the left eyebrow going up, one for the inner right side of the left eyebrow going down… Should I continue?) You’ll be here for a while, but as I said, it’s important to create a symmetrical head so you can cut this process in half and reuse all your left sides to make your right sides (but keep them separated for maximum control, left side shapes, and right side shapes.)

You also need to make sure the shapes are exclusive (don’t have a blendshape where you’ve moved the eyebrow also have changes in the mouth. You don’t want him to move his mouth when you’re trying to raise his eyebrow.) Once you’ve created all your faces, including all the shapes you’ll need for the character to talk, you’ll want to hook them up to your original rigged model. Once you do that, you can create controls for the blendshapes, so you can simply flip a switch on the side of your scene when you’re animating to make the face change. And if you have a plug-in for making controls such as jsfacial, you can create controls that blend blendshapes together (i.e. if you had your jaw open, jaw closed, mouth narrow, and mouth wide, all on the same control, you would roll the control around to make the character look like the character was moving their mouth around in a circle. It helps to be able to have the blendshapes blend and play with each other, so it doesn’t look like you’re just opening and closing the mouth of a ventriloquist dummy. You want a smooth look when you animate, not stiff, and for the shapes to be able to transition nicely from one to the other.

Here is also when you’ll connect the teeth, so when the character opens its mouth, the teeth will follow. On the same control that opens the mouth, you’ll make a set driven key so the control drives the lower teeth going down as well as the opening of the mouth. You’ll also make a separate set of controls and set driven keys to move the tongue so the character can talk realistically (like creating the proper shape with the tongue so it can appear to make an L sound.)

Once you’ve gotten all your facial pieces hooked up to your original face and body, your character should be ready to go. Remember to save your character in each stage in case something happens to your model along the way (because I’ve seen someone’s entire character destroyed by file corruption in the final stages and it is not a fun time, I’m sure.) Make sure to create a new file to animate in as well so you can always have a clean scene with no animation or set pieces cluttering it when you need to bring it into different scenes and shots. It’s a long process, but very much worth the time investment. It’s fun to play with your new puppet once it’s all ready to go!