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Description Once you've created a variety of morphs for your character's facial expressions, creating "sliders" by using the channel haul tool and custom user-channels, will enable you to quickly animate your character's face, by simply transitioning between their various poses.

When I first looked at writing a Step-by-Step for this, I was basing it on Ryan Drue's video back from the 401 days on Lux TV. Naturally, I was expecting this to have changed slightly (as I am writing this during 601 SP5). But halfway through I got stuck because the interface had since changed. So I had to go to the forums for help.

Within an hour or so, I received two responses - one from modo mio, who gave me the answer I wanted, and then Clef took it one step further and gave me the answer I needed by creating an updated video using the newer schematic view. So this article is kind of a hybrid of all three approaches but hopefully the simplest way.

Step-by-Step

Note that this article does not cover the actual creation of your morph maps. It assumes you have already created them or else, you're using a mesh such as the Old Man Head (part of modo's standard Content), which comes with its own set of facial morph maps.

    Create Morph Influence
    • Under > Lists > Morph Maps select the first Morph map, right-click, and choose Add Morph Influence.
    • Right-click and rename the Morph Influence by appending the facial expression description (e.g. Morph Influence - Angry).
    • Rinse, repeat for each of your morph maps.
    Rename Morph Influence
                 
      Create Locator & set how it's displayed
      • Create a Locator in the Item List and rename it 'Face Controls'
      • Drag all of your Morph Influences onto the Locator (just to keep things tidy).
      • Position the Locator in front of the head and a bit to the side (as shown in the top image).
      • With the Face Controls locator still selected, under > Display > 3D Items tab on the right, click on Add Draw Options and fill in fields as shown.
        • Under the Locator Shapes tab below that, fill in fields as per image
        Create User Channels
        • With the Face Controller selected in the Item List, go to > Properties > User Channels > Add User Channel for each of the morphs.
        Link User Channels
        • Go to the Setup tab. The Schematics viewport will be displayed.
        • Go to the Channels tab on the bottom right
        • Scroll down and select all of the morphs channels just created
        • Drag them left into the Schematic viewport
        • From the Items tab, select each of the Morph Influences one-at-a-time and then go to the Channels tab and drag the Strength into the Schematics viewport
        • Wire up each morph influence to its own Strength driver
        Schematics              
        Connect Face Controller to Channel Haul
        • Select the Face Controller from the Item List
        • Go to > Assembly > Settings > Utility > Commandand select  item.channelHaul
        • Click on the Face Controller in the viewport and the Channel Haul will appear.
        • Use the sliders to adjust the character's facial expressions.
        • These can be keyed in the Animation timeline.
      Assembly
      Source

      You can watch the original video by Ryan Drue created for modo 401 (Old Luxology Forums - no longer exists) Later on when 601 came out, there were questions on the forum about how the workflow had since changed where Clef and a modo mio responded

      And this is Clef's video using the schematic view

      Credits  Ryan Drue, a modo mio, Clef
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