Blendshapes input order issue

#1

Hi there!!!
I´m working on a jaguar rig right now and I´ve managed to almost finish it… but as almost is never enough in maya :frowning: I am stuck with this simple issue…
I´ve bound the skin, painted the weights and so on. Now I have created the blendshapes and apparently, they are working fine. However, the the jaw skin it´s attached to the jawbone, as well as the tongue and teeth. And when I test the blendshapes, they don´t “respect” the skincluster. I thought it should be just about changing the input order and here is what I have in the list:
tweak 6
tweak 5
skin cluster
tweak 1
after the blendshape, this is how it´s organised:
blendshape
tweak 7
tweak 6
tweak 5
skin cluster
tweak 1
So, If I put the blendshape under the skin cluster, it “respects” the position of the jaw. However, it is distorting the mesh a little bit, changing the position of the jaguar. Also, if I combine different blendshapes in the blendshape editor, they add more and more distortion to the mesh.
I´ve tried different orders, but the only one that doesn´t change the mesh is the skin cluster under the blendshapes, and of course, it doesn´t work for me. I am not a good rigger, but I really need to finish this jaguar. I wonder if I have to setup something before creating the blendshapes?
I would really appreciate if someone could give me a hand with this one! :rolleyes:

#2

My reccomendation would be to get a clean version of your mesh and the blendshapes.

To do this look at your shape inputs. you see all those tweak nodes. they have an envelope flag. Turn everything except the skin cluster to 0.

Then duplicate that and call it Base_mesh_clean.

Then turn off the envelope of all the tweak nodes and skin and only keep the blendshape connections. This should kill all your offsets. Now duplicate that and save it as blednshape “yourshapesname”_clean.

Then rebind the clean base and copy the skin weighting from your other one. Then reapply the clean shapes to the new base mesh clean. If ti works, save the scene cleanwork and then delete the old model and the bad shapes.

You should then have only one or two max tweak nodes and the problem should be resolved.

#3

Hi there,
thank you so much for your reply. I tried to delete the history of the mesh before, but the problem is that I can´t copy the skin weights from the older mesh to the knew one. The result is a bit odd. Do you have any idea of why it happens? Anyways, thanks to your post I understood there was an offset between the original mesh and the bind (this should be very basic, but was quite hard for me to understand the issue :surprised ), so I just reimported a cleaner version of the mesh and now it´s working. Thanks!
Btw, how do you change the envelopes? I believe it should be very useful but couldn´t understand how to do it :curious: