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kassun
10-22-2003, 03:39 AM
Using Maya 5.0. I have just started on the animation part of my demo reel. I have my character all modeled and I am rdy to rig and setup blend shapes. There are many ways to go about things in 3D so from where I am what is the best route to go. I have created the blend shapes allready for the face (eye brows, various facial movements, and phanetical shapes). I have read on a few posts where ppl have skined before creating the blendshapes. Sould I rig and skin then move onto added the blendshapes or should this be done befor i gig? I would appreciate any direction you guys can offer. I modeld my character using smooth proxy. The head is seperate from the body seperated where the neck meets the shirt so i don't have needless geomentry duplicated when I created the blend shapes.
I will post some images of my character tomorrow.
Also on a side note, when I create the blend shapes do I duplicate the face's at the rest position? I have ran into some problems when seperating the facial and brow blends. The result is when I blend a upller lip lift and a brow right brow raise the the head fights the rest position and the lip raise, because the brow raise was modeled with the mouth at the rest position. I sincerly hope this make sense. Thanks guys.

Thanks for your time,
Kassun
Matt Leishman
10-22-2003, 03:33 PM
either way of approaching the setting up of morph targets is gonna work, although to minimize the amount of work you'd have to do to facilitate making the morphs work after already skinning, i'd suggest setting up your blendshapes before you skin.

you could duplicate the original shape (rest shape) to create all the other shapes if you'd like. although, as long as your topology (or vertex amount, or vertex numbering) doesn't change, you could use the face that you created for the "A" shape as a starting point for your "E" shape (just as an example). the bottom line is that if your topology doesn't change, and your vertex numbering doesn't change, then you could use any of the heads to make another morph target.

hope that isn't too "wordy". good luck.:)
kassun
10-22-2003, 04:14 PM
thank you sithwarlord :)

Kassun
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