Blend shapes and modelling a head

[caracolina]

Hello.
I have a basic question, but it is nevertheless giving me
alot of headaches because I do not know the solution.

I have looked extensively into the LIVING MAYA posts, but doing a search on 'blend shape' I could not find any related solutions.

The issue is this:(however basic this may sound, please bear with me)

I have a half of a characters head in a neutral face.

I created a duplicate of the same head, but created a snarl facial expression.

I was wondering how to model an ie. snarl on the right side of the face, and then duplicate it in the negative mirror, and attach an opposite neutral side so i can have a separate head for a 'rightsnarl and leftsnarl controls' that can be used in the blend shape editor.

i have tried to do this, but when I duplicate the side of face in '-Z', and attach, and then use it as a target for the blendshape, when I use the slider the original "base" head translates to the location of the target.

I am aware that i am doing something wrong, however, i have tried the local/world coordinates when creating the blend shape, and i know this option is not the problem.

And I was wondering the best way to create SEPARATE snarl LEFT and snarl RIGHT that can morph the original base head properly.

I know this is a dumb question, but please if you have the solution and a basic idea on HOW i should go about creating targets for blend shapes please let me know because i am in dire need to create this project.

best regards.
richyb

[failure]

Delete the history on each target, move it to exact position relative to base and freeze the translations. Now you can move it wherever you wish and create blendshapes normaly.

[oeufdelune]

You can't mirror a Blend Shape. Try to delete the history of your Blend Shapes and you'll see Maya will place your Orginal Mesh on your Blend Shapes when you active the Blend Shape node.
Maya need the historic of the Blend Shapes.
When you mirror them, they have a wrong historic.
So you have to make your Blend Shape again for the other side. But there's a plug-in to make it which is here : http://www.highend3d.com/maya/mel/?group=m...;sort=file\_name
use the "flip selcted" option to flip your blendshape.
Good Luck !!

[caracolina]

thanks oeufdelune
but what exact plugin script should i d/l and use?
they are all alphabetical, and nothing is called
'flip selected'
regards
richyb

[failure]

• create half of the face
• duplicate it and tweak the duplicate to snarl
• mirror-duplicate both of halves - what you should have now is: left-normal, right-normal, left-snarl and right-snarl
• now make more copies and combine as follows: left-normal + right-normal, left-snarl + right-normal, right-snarl + left-normal. That's 3 full heads in total.
• merge the vertices on heach head to make one shell per head
• since you've combined halves with same topology resulting heads will have same topology too.
• now just do what I wrote in previous post and everything should work peachy.

[jand]

The current name of the excellent mel script is :Keegan_flipShape v3.0
Truly good stuff!
Also take a look at Keegan_Masquerade Beta v1.0, FaceStudio and blendShape_Manager for handling lots of blendshapes.

For good reading about face setups try to find ErickMiller_HyperRealFacialRigging Siggraph MMC 2004,
StephenStahlberg_Photorealistic Siggraph 2001,
Animating Facial Features and Expressions_BillFleming,DarrisDobbs,CharlesRiverMedia Books.