Facial animation is an integral component of character animation. The face of a character can be animated to impart a range of emotions and expressions. Maya has two deformation tools that ease character setup for facial animation: cluster deformers and blend shape.

Cluster deformers enable you to control a set of an object's points (CVs, vertices, or lattice points) with varying amounts of influence to create a target shape for an animation.

A Blend Shape deformer provides an interface for blending between various target shapes, to control the range of movement for the cluster on an object or face.

In this lesson, you will be introduced to cluster deformers in order to shape a characters mouth into a smile pose. You will learn to use the Blend Shape feature so you can animate the face from a neutral pose to a smile. In this lesson, you learn how to:

• Select CVs in a region and create a cluster deformer.
• Use the cluster deformer handle to adjust the position of a cluster deformer.
• Use the Paint Cluster Weights Tool to refine the cluster weight values.
• Create a Blend Shape deformer to control the blending between target shapes.