HELP- Different meshes before rigging

#1

Hi guys, so I have this school project due soon and i’m about to rig this character model and they are with different parts, for example, the head is a different mesh and the same with hands and other parts of the body. For added info I combined all the body parts of the character with their own textures already on place before doing my first attempt of rigging. So far so good in fact I already skin weighted it. But I’m having troubles when it comes to face rigging, in youtube tutorials it’s like I have to separate the head from the body before rigging and they can easily put it up in place again, already combined to the body and I don’t know how. If I did separate all of the body parts of my model the textures is a mess, it’s all over the place.

So my real question is, what is the best way or workflow of rigging.

FYI: I’m a newbie so I rely on youtube tutorials

If I didn’t make myself clear please ask me questions and help me please. Thank you

#2

" what is the best way or workflow of rigging. "

Both methods are okay that is several meshes or one single mesh. The reason why I would prefer several mesh (interms of the facial rigging) so that the I have few data to duplicate when it comes to blendshapes.

#3

But I have to combine all of the parts in order to rig it properly, or is there another way that you can give me? Thanks for the reply

#4

Then you can combine all the parts. Again there is not problem with that. You can still do a blendshape but the size is just bigger.

#5

im not rigger but since im generalist i have some experience about this things… i remember one kind of trick to keep single mesh head and body , and its about duplicate head and cut it making like a mask single geometry , then u rig all blendshapes in this simple mask easy to control object , thru wrap deformer u apply the deformation to the whole single object , i think its quite clean way to keep facial rig isolated from whole object , and for what i remember wrap is very fast when its just exactly same vertex position from one geo to other since both start from same position and only need deal with those face vertex not whole body … anyways its years ago things , dont know now how would be better…

#6

Normally, you want a continuous mesh. So if you have diferent mesh for the hands, face, etc, you may want to make sure it’s one surface. Otherwise in motion you will see the seam. Even after combining, you still have the seams if you don’t merge the vertices. In case your seams are not visible, you can keep them separate.
Now the face rigging part:
I would suggest keep that head in the bigger mesh too, not separated. As far as I know, Maya’s blendshapes were updated recently and only the difference is stored in the blendshape node - somebody please correct or confirm this assertion. So it doesn’t matter if you have the vertices from all the body, only the changed vertices will be stored.

A few years back I had the head separated, then combined with the body, merged the neck vertices and kept the history. This way I could work only with the head, while the seam was not visible - as a side effect, the rig was a bit slower.