new facial rig on already rigged character

[Dichotomy]

you can create a selection set with the head faces, duplicate them, and then do the blend shape on that selection set. But if you create the blends with parrellel selected in the advanced tab, you shouldn't need to do that.

also, if you character already has a skin on it, you will need to change the inputs of the blend so that the blends are calculated first, then skin second. :thumbsup:

[Arcon]

you can create a selection set with the head faces, duplicate them, and then do the blend shape on that selection set.
:thumbsup:

not sure i follow... how do i duplicate a seletion set (do u mean regular set or quick sleect set?). i've heard of blendshaping cluster to cluster, but what i'm after is being able to export head meshes only.

[brentorama]

Full body models for head blend shapes hey? sounds heavy. Why not set your skin weight to 0, select the faces that make up your head, duplicate them and call the duplicate "head wrap" Make your blendshapes out of duplicates of 'head wrap" and apply a wrap deformer to your fulll body mesh using the head wrap object as the influence object, then be sure to move the wrap input below the skin cluster in the input editor. Turn your skin weight back on and presto. Just be sure when selecting the faces to duplicate that you go a few loops farther than you'll need to eliminate crunchiness around the seam.

[Arcon]

select the faces that make up your head, duplicate them and call the duplicate "head wrap" Make your blendshapes out of duplicates of 'head wrap" and apply a wrap deformer to your fulll body mesh using the head wrap object as the influence object


thanks for your reply, interesting idea - i think i see what you mean, but my experience with wraps in the past has been mostly negative... i think the performance of the high-res bound rig would take a big hit from using a wrap, especially as an influence with some 13,000 verts in the head.

it might be a hassle modelling facial poses into full body meshes but for now i think i'd prefer that if it gets me a faster bound rig :)

[john_homer]

the following is just cut and paste (from me) from a previous thread..

you can do it (a 1 piece surface, with blendshapes only on the head) )simply by combining (the head and body) and merging multiple verts (in 1 go), then DELETING HISTORY.
as long as you select them in the correct order before combining,
its all just a matter of vertex ordering on the resulting mesh, and the verts on the first object in the selection to be combined does NOT have its verts reordered (this is the key)
then the blendshapes (of just the head) can simply be applied to a mesh (of the entire character) with "check typology" OFF, and it will work.
no history (except the blendshape) is needed, so it doesn't slow anything down.

when you apply a bendshape to a mesh, maya only records the "difference" between the target and the base mesh, that is to say, that if you have a mesh that is 9999 verts and you apply it as a blendshape to another 9999 verts mesh, but only 1 vert has moved, then that blendshape node will be the same size (and use the same resources) as the same 1 vert move on a 4 vert mesh.

the real advantage of separating the body and head is in the modeling, not in the resulting blendshape.

BTW, this is covered every 2-3 months or so, check the archives for a more detailed description...

.j

[Arcon]

thanks to all who replied - i've come back to this after a few days and following that method the head blends now work. except when the body moves and headBlend is on the head moves back.. presumably 'cause the blendNode is at the top of the input stack... maya won't actually let me drag the headBlend below the polyUnite in the input list?

[ruukki]

I had exactly the same problem - I added blend shape after the rest of the rig, and I had no way around. The character's head just moved off each time I implemented the blend, and so forth, just as described below. Lucky me it was only my second character, which wasn't too good anyway, so I didn't get too frustrated... please, if you find a way sometime, let me in on it too!

thanks to all who replied - i've come back to this after a few days and following that method the head blends now work. except when the body moves and headBlend is on the head moves back.. presumably 'cause the blendNode is at the top of the input stack... maya won't actually let me drag the headBlend below the polyUnite in the input list?

[Arcon]

I had exactly the same problem - I added blend shape after the rest of the rig, and I had no way around. The character's head just moved off each time I implemented the blend, and so forth, just as described below. please, if you find a way sometime, let me in on it too!

yep there is a way - the Combine needs to be done after the new headBlend otherwise the new blend can't be shifted down beneath the skin in the inputs.

i don't like the head detach method anyway, it seemed to slow down the bound rig a lot and there's no real advantage to it except modelling on smaller blendshape files. just use full body meshes and isolate selected faces if its a heavy mesh.

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