Separate the head for blendshapes

#1

Hi There,
We have an animal character mesh for the body and head together, there’s not a good place to separate the head for blendshapes without showing an obvious seam.

                                        Is there a way to just copy over the polygons for  only the head to model into blendshapes?  I don’t want the entire mesh  to copy over for blendshapes - I’m concerned that                       making so many blendshapes from the entire mesh  would take up a lot of memory and resources.                     

                                        Any feedback is greatly appreciated.
                   Thanks
                   Robert
#2

I’m pretty sure you can’t use part of a mesh for a full mesh blendshape with vanilla Maya.

Using a full mesh for facial shapes isn’t that bad after you delete the target meshes.
The norm for me is to use the full creature/character meshes for face blends…The rigs are snappy and responsive and have minimal resource requirements…again if you delete the target shapes.
The master scene with all the targets can be pretty massive…but nothing so bad that its required changing how I’ve done things.

I guess if you want to use an isolated part of the mesh you can use a wrap deformer to have the isolated blendshaped face drive the full mesh.

For some reason I think this sweet script might let you do what you are looking for:
http://tools3d.com/
I’ve used it to transfer point orders…but somewhere in there I think this might be able to help. No idea where…and I haven’t used in it in a while.
Not much help.

Good luck
~Ben

#3

Thanks for weighing in Ben

#4

Hi…!
See this http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?p=6998777#post6998777
Rgds,

#5

Hi shinyprem,
Thanks for your input. In the other thread, you wrote:

Hi…!
You can cut the model only when its finalled in modelling detail vise… (any further alteration will create pblm) at the neck and have that duplicated to create BS on face mesh. Then weld the vertex where u have cut preferably after the UV is done and apply ur targets to this mesh.
Rgds,

If we reattach vertex where we cut the head, won’t the UV’s be a little off? They may not looked perfectly lined up again - especially on a furry animal model.

What do you think about other feedback - that the blendshape made only from moving some facial verts will not cause much memory or resource requirements, because Maya only computes those vertices which were manipulated…

#6

Hi shinyprem,
Thanks for your input. In the other thread, you wrote:

Hi…!
You can cut the model only when its finalled in modelling detail vise… (any further alteration will create pblm) at the neck and have that duplicated to create BS on face mesh. Then weld the vertex where u have cut preferably after the UV is done and apply ur targets to this mesh.
Rgds,

If we reattach vertex where we cut the head, won’t the UV’s be a little off? They may not looked perfectly lined up again - especially on a furry animal model.

What do you think about other feedback - that the blendshape made only from moving some facial verts will not cause much memory or resource requirements, because Maya only computes those vertices which were manipulated…

#7

I bookmarked this a while ago:
http://forums.cgsociety.org/showthread.php?f=88&t=857297

It explains how to separate the head and how to recombine it to the body so that the vertex order is the same. It also outlines how to create blendshapes between selection sets, so that you don’t need to separate the head at all (see post #8).

#8

All super useful thoughts…definitely worth using in the future!
Thanks all.

#9

Thanks gonzalimator
I think the ‘selection sets’ concept may be what I was looking for. I was told by an animator a few months ago that there was a way, but I did not find out exactly how, and I think that is the way. We will give it a tray. Thanks again.

#10

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