facial animation question

[thehive]

you need to separate the head from the body do your blends an then reattach it , keep in mind you need to do a face extract to keep the point order intact hope that helps

[TBone2008]

do I extract and create morph targets BEFORE I rig it ? (thus, rig after I have all the blend shapes).

also, so, do I rig one object (body and face as one model), or 2 models. or maybe doesnt matter ?

[derik]

Wheater the head is attached or not is up to you , I like to keep it attached.

What I do is Rig the body , create my facial blendshapes on the face mesh (seperated) and then wrap deform the face on the rig with the one containing the blendshapes.
Watch out for deformation order though!

You can change the deformation order by right clicking on the mesh > Inputs > All inputs

And I would lay out UV's before I rig the character , so that I can get rid of unwanted History.

[refract]

You can texture it at anytime, but make sure you uv it before you rig. The modifications of uv'ing will add an enormous history on the object and it will be slow. There are ways around this afterwards, but its very time consuming.

[derik]

Well UVing after rigging the character is possible without to much trouble

Just make a duplicate of the rigged mesh , preferably before you rig the character
Lay out the uv's on the duplicated mesh

after rigging the character , plug the last piece of history (of the copied mesh)(the last node before it goes into the shapeNode) into the first meshshape in the "hierarchy" (hypergraph) (normally called something like "meshShapeOriginal" , if the rigged mesh is called "mesh") output or outmesh --> inmesh

and then break that connection again.
Your mesh will be updated and no history will be added to your rig

I normally use this method for mesh changes aswell , if you add new points to the mesh , those points will just have to be added to the skincluster.

(and that is the reason why I use a wrapDeform for the face , then changes to the mesh wont screw up my blendshapes)

[refract]

Very nice, I just got that to work Derik. Took a minute to wrap me head around it, but it works perfectly.
cheers

[derik]

Cool , I didn't explain it very well (looking at the post again) , but I'm glad you could figure out what I was saying.
If anyone else would like a better explanation , please let me know and Ill put something together.

[TBone2008]

Derik,
Yes, I read it couple times and would be helpful for me if you could explain more give more details about the procedure.

thanks!

[derik]

Cool
I'm a little busy at the moment , but I'll put something together (hopefully this week still).
If I don't post it soon , I probably forgot. Then please just remind on this forum.

Thanx

[refract]

What Derik is doing is duplicating the skinned mesh,.. make edits on it, then go to material editor (hypershade,.. {? god who named that crap?}) and show input and output connections on both meshes.
Take the last history node on the edited mesh and mmb it to the shapenode ["meshShapeOriginal"] of the skinned one,.. and choose 'other' which opens connection editor. Input outmesh to inmesh of the skinned one.

Melscript? (select object, go to bind pose, dupe, hide skinned, edit edit edit,..save and it outputs to the input to the skinned?) I'm gonna see if my rigger can set it up. Thanx derik, the beers are on me :)

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