Displacement Driven Blend Shapes

[abigbeast]

Hello, I'm a senior in college working on an advanced facial set-up for a high resolution character, and I was wondering if anyone knew if a good tutorial that thoroughly goes through how to set up a blend shape that drives a displacement map so that certain wrinkles will show up in the skin when and where appropriate. I am currently using the Hyper-Realistic Facial Setup DVD from Alias, and he does go over the technique a little on the DVD, but he does not really explain it too well. If there is something out there, please post it, it would be greatly appreciated.

-Justin

[joojaa]

Depends on how you need/want to set it up. Usualy piping all textures to a multiply divide node that connects to your texture in question for that blend and the corresopnding blend amount and tehn connects that toa a +-average node taht connect to your material. This would mimic the additive quality of blends.

There are offcourse as many ways to skin a fish as theres ways to use texture nodess wich is a infinite reach.

[abigbeast]

I was watching the Hyper-Realistic Facial Setup DVD , and he has the two textures connecting into the plusMinusAverage node before putting that value into the Multiply Divide node.

Also, do you/anyone know how to connect two textures into the plusMinusAverage node? Every time I try the connect the second, it breaks the connection with the first?

Thanks,
-Justin

[joojaa]

Oh yeah, he probably uses the gain as blend magnitude and multiply as global gain okay no prob (i wouldnt necceserily do that since i might want to have different magnitudes for the textures). In that case you must connect the blend attrib to the corresponding gain of the texture node isntead of the multiply divide and emka the global scale iwth the last multiply divide instead.

Okay you cant do it realy wall in the connection editor! but you can do it quite easily in the hypershade. left click on the arrow out of your texture and choose out alpha (or color if you use that to dirve displacements) and then select the in arrow of the plus minus average and choose input1D->[0] repeat with the next and choose input1D->[1] notice a input 2 has apppeared...

Or use mel.

[abigbeast]

Thanks man, I appreciate the help.

Have you ever had a problem with Maya 6 crashing when creating a plusMinusAverage node? It's been happening almost every time recently, and I cant figure out why. I tried it on a different system, and it worked fine a few times, but other than those few times it just crashes?? Oh well, I'll contact alias. Thank man

-Justin

[joojaa]

Hasnt crashed on any system ive been running on so far (and pretty much every maya scene ive ever used has a plusminus avarage node in them so i would notice the intant it has problems)... but thenegain people have wierd problems. Are you running 6.01 ? or what?

maybe the problem is elsewhere... that stems form something you do in conjunction with the +- avg

[abigbeast]

Well, I can actually create the node, but as soon as I change the function to subtract it crashes, regardless if it was created in a new scene, or cutrrent one. I dunno, just thought I'd ask. I'll be contecting Alias about it today so it's not that big of a deal. Thanks a bunch man.

-Justin

[joojaa]

offcourse... and will just tell you to upgrade to the latest maya