Wondering someting about Blendshapes and Modeling

[chromeus]

i don't believe you can use blendshapes for single mesh characters. if you can put a collar on your character so you could detach the head, then you can do it whenever the head is finished. if it's single mesh though, you're gonna be stuck doing wire deformers, bones, and clusters.

[bigfatMELon]

Yes, you can do blendshapes with single mesh characters. But unless you have some clever scripty-thingy that goes about attaching the heads of all those targets to copies of your finished body, then do them after the entire body is done.

The only drawback to blendshapes on the entire body is having to carry all those mesh copies around. However, it is possible to delete the targets after to connect the blendshapes to save some space. There is even a script on highend3d that will recreated the deleted target geometry if needed.

-jl

[chromeus]

well ok, there ya go. wouldn't blendshapes screw up your bone deformations though? i know you gotta change the order of deformations, but it seems like a blendshape would try and target the entire body back to the pose... my only experience with blendshapes is with detached heads, so i'm sure you know more about it than i.

[svenip]

you could also do it by a wrap deformer just for the head part to drive the blendshapes.

[bigfatMELon]

well ok, there ya go. wouldn't blendshapes screw up your bone deformations though? i know you gotta change the order of deformations, but it seems like a blendshape would try and target the entire body back to the pose...

Test it for yourself on a simple object really quick. It works due to deformations (like all things in 3D) being done in a certain order. It's just like mixing any number of deformations.

-jl

[wrend]

i think that blendShapes will retain only the tweak informatn betwn base and target ....so if your just working on your head for blends (in context of full body), then it wont be creating a whole bunch of extra informatn for rest of the body your arent touching (only extra resources if you are keeping copies of the blend targets....in which case it is rather expensive whole chunks arent used...but if you can delete, it'd be fine, and with the comfort that you can retrieve your targets .....easy enuf to do manually....go to full weighting of just one target, copy geom ...or use scripts, a number of blendShape UI outhere)
g.luck

[el diablo]

yes you can do it. all you need to do is model your entire character body and head seamed together. duplicate this character. delete the head on one and the body on the other. build all of you tagets and create the blendShapes. bind both objects and make sure all the shared vertices for the head and body have the same weighting. animate away. the only time you want to attach the 2 and weld them is when you render and not in your bind file. you could easily make a script the selects the two objects, attaches them, and welds the vertices by recording it like a macro. run this script when you are ready to render. thats it....el diablo

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