Blend Shape & Rig Animation

[kokiri]

Hi everyone (ignore all that extra stuff on the bottom, that's just the old stuff that was on this thread; I didn't want to make a new one and take up space - but I still need help with it though...replies to it are still welcome)

Okay so in addition a morph using blend shape, I also need to have body movement. Target character is sitting cross-legged with his arms loosely held out. Then he morphs into a three headed monster standing in sort of a jumping-jack position. So as he is morphing, his legs should be changing into a standing position - is this possible to do with a rigged character? Has it been done before?

I know that vertices cannot be manipulated once the body is binded...and then if stuff need to be re-sculpted
then said body has to be unbound..and probably weight-painted again too. Guess a different solution would be to blend the whole animation but that would probably mean some parts of the body will squish into unrecognizable ugly shapes before becoming an arm again.

Thanks in advance.

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Anyway, I've made a character head..probably several thousand polygons...(I can't seem to get the heads up display for the poly count...or the grid to come out for that matter). So then I cut it in half and duplicated it. Using this duplicated mesh, I made it into half the face of a totally different character.

I want to make a morph of a person into a fat monster, and right now I've only finished making the half of the heads for each. So when I make the blend shape for this left half it works...and then I scale them by -1, and I have the blend shape working for the right side. Problem is I want to stitch these too halves together.

To do this, I combined the neutral blend shapes (left and right halves of human face) and stitched them together by merging vertices. After it's all stitched together, I scrub through the animation. and as the human is morphing, the vertices on the middle seam come apart so the monster is still two halves...there are also random vertices that poke out...I'd imagine those ones went out too far from the result of merged vertices?

Please help, I'm stuck..I've tried the blend shape mirror mel that I found on the highend downloads section..but it doesn't seem to work...that or I didn't use it correctly..Or is there a better method of doing this besides using blend shape?

Oh yeah, a slightly irrelevant problem as well. The human head I referred to above has a body as well (I just took off so maya would run faster and I wouldn't have so many polys to deal with). I want to extract the body of the human, separate from the head so I can start working on it to make him morph into the fat monster, but after I extract it, there's shading problems, his abdominal region looks like crumpled paper in some parts...I checked the normals and they seem fine. Test render shows the crumpling as well. Does anyone know how to fix this?

Thanks in advance

[pixl]

Might look at this.
or just Google:
Maya mirror blend shapes

[kokiri]

Hey thanks PixL.

I have googled it....and results I found were either too complicated to understand or didn't work. I'll try those mel scripts from your link. Does anyone know if merging the vertices after the mirror (so that I have one symmetrical mesh) would effect the blend shape?

Actually I'm not really sure how to go about this..
Would it have been better to keep the mesh intact (full head) and used the mirror script to manipulate the mesh so as to avoid the combine?
But now that I only have a half and a duplicate, how would I go about this with scripts and whatnot?

Thanks for the help.

[user_deleted]

QUOTE
Target character is sitting cross-legged with his arms loosely held out. Then he morphs into a three headed monster standing in sort of a jumping-jack position. So as he is morphing, his legs should be changing into a standing position - is this possible to do with a rigged character? Has it been done before?

Again issue might be conceptual here... for crossed legs to "morph" into standing legs... Can you visualize this in your head in a compelling way? If it doesnt' work in your head, there's little chance it'll work on screen.

Think about the artistic part before the technical part... I'd even suggest doing a-->b sketches, with 2-3 in betweens, and pencil in ideas on where to rig certain things.

For ex. Maybe it looks like the cross-legged character is rising to his knees (still cross legged) and then the knees morph into the feet and the thighs extend to be full new legs? Just one way to go.

On a technical level, it looks pretty tricky. I would strongly suggest taking a deep breath, and going slowly.

It is possible to have a blend shape and a smooth skin node on the same mesh, you just have to watch the order in the input list. I think blendshape has to be first.

But I doubt having one skeleton that does both characters is the answer. I'd say two different skeletons in the scene - animate them to where they roughly line up - feed both their geometry into one other mesh via blendshape - and do a blendshape ramp around the middle of the timeline.

If your two characters don't have identical vertex numbering and you're not in Maya 8+, look up cSmartBlend, will save your life.