Animation: Getting Eyebrow splines to follow facial morph

[Pgraphics]

Sorry I'm using Max 5.1

[EricChadwick]

One way could be an Attachment Controller. Use it to assign the eyebrow splines to some verts on the forehead.

Another way could be a Linked Xform modifier.

Look em up in the Help.

[EricChadwick]

This topic came up recently...

creating eyelashes that move with morph-targeted eyelid animation?
http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=8287

Animation : polygon eyelashes?
http://www.cgtalk.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=58270

[Pgraphics]

Thanks so much. I'll check the links and check out those topics in the help. I tried xform and it didn't work right but that could just have been me doing something wrong. Thanks again for the tips.

[EricChadwick]

Oops, I was wrong about Linked Xform. Won't work right for this, it basically just links the whole object or selected sub-objects to another whole object. That won't help the eyebrows follow the brows... sorry about adding confusion.

[Pgraphics]

Thanks again for the replies. I think I can handle the eyebrows now.

New question: I set up the bones rig for the character and skinned it to adjust envelopes and test. I'm pretty close to what I want but I haven't set up the morph targets for the face yet. Can I just add the morpher between the edit mesh and skin or will I need to delete my skin modifier, add the morphs then re-skin and reset the envelopes. Everything I've read has the morphs done before for the skin. I'm thinking there is probably a reason for that :)

[EricChadwick]

Yeah, morpher mod can be added after Skin is set up. Placing it under Skin allows those verts to be deformed by Skin, so they move with the bones.

It often helps to select all the morphing verts and assign them 100% to a single bone, so they just move along with the skeleton but aren't bent around.

Some people use this modifier stack setup for facial animation:

Skin (deform via bones, for body animation)
Edit Mesh (attach body to head, weld neck verts)
Morpher (head morph targets, for facial animation)
Editable Poly (head model)

If you're using envelopes in Skin, the morpher may push verts outside the envelopes, messing them up. If so, then use "Bake Selected Verts" in Skin to prevent it.

Some helpful Skin tools:

Chuggnut's Skintools
http://www.chuggnut.com/scripts/skintools/skintools.html

Grant Adams SkinToolsEnv & SkinWeightingTools
http://members.optushome.com.au/ghra/scripts.htm#max4

A few more are available on the Discreet forum, notably Bio Skin by Kees Rijnen and Mirror Weights by Christoph Sprenger.
http://support.discreet.com/webboard/wbpx.dll/~3dsmax

Hope this helps you.

[Pgraphics]

Thanks again Posm.

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