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goldenarms
06-09-2010, 03:29 PM
I am working on a dwarf character that will need to eventually be rigged and animated. As you can see he has a long braided beard, at the moment it is a separate piece of geometry(still a WIP). I thought modeling the beard instead of fighting with maya's hair would be a easier approach but I am wondering how well this will work with a facial rig? I was planning on using blend shapes for the setup but I have no experience with a face half covered by a beard.
My question is; is it better to model the beard and head as one object? Would it work leaving them separate or would it be a huge headache? Is it possible to just combine them into one object deleting the faces under the beard geo? If anyone out there has any suggestions it would be greatly appreciated.
http://i359.photobucket.com/albums/oo35/danine90/beardieWIP2.jpg
mfiorilli
06-10-2010, 02:28 PM
What I would do is keep the beard as a separate geo. The you can do your facial rig the way you want and once it is done, there's a couple of ways of attach the beard to the geos, but I found only one that is truly stable. Here it is:

Where you want to attach the beard, create a nurbs surface that follow the more precisely possible the polygon surface underneath. You have to create a kind of "patch" with a nurbs surface. Once it's done, just wrap the nurbs surface to the polygon's one. So when the polygon is deformed, the nurbs follow. After that, create a cMuscleSurfAttach on the nurbs surface. You will find it in Muscle -> Bonus Rigging -> Surface Attach. Now you can attach your beard's rig to the cMuscleSurfAttach.

You could also create a cMuscleSurfAttach directly on polygons but it would easily flip. That's the advantage on having it on a nurbs. It never flips!
goldenarms
06-11-2010, 02:32 PM
mfiorilli,
I will give that a try! Thanks a lot for the advice
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