playmesumch00ns
01-17-2003, 11:39 AM
Someone asked yesterday if there was a way to edit a character's blend-shapes 'as they appear when skinned' when rigging as-per Steven Stahlberg's excellent tutorial.
I am going through this stage of a character right now, so I wrote a script to do this. Full instructions for use are in the script header, but in order to do what you wanted:
1) Source the script and run it.
2) Make sure you've got a bunch of duplicate meshes that
you're going to use for blend shapes ready.
3) Set the joint rotation on your skinned model to the 'problem area'
4) Duplicate the skinned mesh 'flat'. i.e. with no inputs or upstream graph.
5) In the alCopyEdits window, select this duplicated mesh and
click "Select source"
6) Make any changes necessary to the duplicated mesh to make it look good and click "Save Changes"
7) now select one of your meshes you're going to use for blend shapes and click "Apply changes". Voila, the changes are applied to that mesh and it is ready to be added to your skinned mesh as a blend shape just like in Steven's tut.
8) you can delete the duplicated mesh
Only limitation is you can't apply changes 'transparently' to objects with history.
In the first version, the script would let you make changes to the actual skinned mesh, then "cut and paste" the changes to the blend-shape mesh. Only trouble was Maya would always create polyMoveVertex nodes on the skinned mesh regardless.
I've also include my alMirrorVtx.mel, which just lets you mirror vertex edits from one object to another (good for copying the changes from the left-arm blend shape to the right-arm blend shape, for example)
enjoy! I hope they're useful.
Download here (http://www26.brinkster.com/ondez/blendShapeTools.zip)
I am going through this stage of a character right now, so I wrote a script to do this. Full instructions for use are in the script header, but in order to do what you wanted:
1) Source the script and run it.
2) Make sure you've got a bunch of duplicate meshes that
you're going to use for blend shapes ready.
3) Set the joint rotation on your skinned model to the 'problem area'
4) Duplicate the skinned mesh 'flat'. i.e. with no inputs or upstream graph.
5) In the alCopyEdits window, select this duplicated mesh and
click "Select source"
6) Make any changes necessary to the duplicated mesh to make it look good and click "Save Changes"
7) now select one of your meshes you're going to use for blend shapes and click "Apply changes". Voila, the changes are applied to that mesh and it is ready to be added to your skinned mesh as a blend shape just like in Steven's tut.
8) you can delete the duplicated mesh
Only limitation is you can't apply changes 'transparently' to objects with history.
In the first version, the script would let you make changes to the actual skinned mesh, then "cut and paste" the changes to the blend-shape mesh. Only trouble was Maya would always create polyMoveVertex nodes on the skinned mesh regardless.
I've also include my alMirrorVtx.mel, which just lets you mirror vertex edits from one object to another (good for copying the changes from the left-arm blend shape to the right-arm blend shape, for example)
enjoy! I hope they're useful.
Download here (http://www26.brinkster.com/ondez/blendShapeTools.zip)