Facial rig switching High res - Low res?

#1

Hi,
I bet that this topic have been up before and that I suck at using the search function since I do not know what it’s called. I want to transfer blend information+skinning from low res to high res so the animator can switch resolution.

The current character i have 3 geometry stages.

  1. LOW - is a level 1 mesh from Zbrush that is chopped in pieces for high performance animation.
  2. Medium - is a mesh in one piece with deformations, but it’s still a level 1 mesh.
  3. High - is a level 3 mesh from Zbrush and it’s planned for render with additional active/dynamic normal maps.

I have currently have skinned the Medium mode (low res) mesh and transfered the skinning to the chopped face and made facial poses and it also have corrective blendshapes added to it.
Animations seems to work fine.

Now, I thought of transferring the skinning and animation to the high res mesh (level 3 from Zbrush)
How do you dudes normally do this?
Do I need to make high res blendshapes aswell or is it some way I can make the high res inherit the information from the low res?

How do you do in production?

Maya 2013 is the software I’m using.

Sorry if the topic have been up (it would be a miracle if the topic haven’t come up)

Thanks for reading!

#2

I did find this tutorial:
http://www.3dtotal.com/index_tutorial_detailed.php?id=1134#.Uoj54Y0Xsp8

Is this the suggiested method of today or is it some other methods that also are available?

#3

Updates:
Thanks to this thread: http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=88&t=1082106
I found a solution for transfering the blendshapes from the Low res mesh to the medium res mesh.

There is how ever a problem.
When I created the “face blendshape base”
I simply spilt the medium mesh around the neck and removed the remaining polygons. (Detach component>select unwanted polys> delete.

Now around that edge, the vertex ID is not kept, meaning that the blend shape does not function as intended, how do you solve this problem?

Or do you have any other method for it?

EDIT:
Never mind
Found the solution here:
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?t=857297

This thread can now be closed!

#4

This thread has been automatically closed as it remained inactive for 12 months. If you wish to continue the discussion, please create a new thread in the appropriate forum.