Best way to attach poly head to body for animation

[playmesumch00ns]

Hi,

I've got a character modelled from polys. At the moment his head and body are seperate pieces but I'll need to attach them before smoothing as there's nothing to cover the join at his neck.

Can anyone tell me the best way to approach the facial animation. I want to do blend shapes on the head but won't these get lost when I do the attach. I don't want to do 50 blends for the whole body!

Thanks

Anders

[deke-kincaid]

You can make a copy of the head and attach it to the body and delete history on it. Then use the wrap deformer to attach just the lowrez blend shape head to the entire body(head included).

[badcookie]

another way is to reorder the verts.

1. select the head and then the body, do a combine
2. manually merge the connecting verts
3. duplicate the entire character
4. delete faces that were included in your original body, (excluding the head)
5. center pivot and delete history on the new head (DO NOT FREEZE TRANSFORMATIONS)
   you can delete history on your character as well

this has a way of reordering verts for you... so the blend shapes won't use the information from the entire body, only the head.

this allows you to bind the new head to a joint structure, create lattices, whatever method you use... and then duplicate the shapes off of the new head, apply all the blend shapes parrallel on the new head, and then use the new head as the sole front of chain blend shape input for your character.

Hope this makes sense