Wire Deformer + Blend Shapes

[themiragemaker]

hi
The situation..
I have a polygonal face created with the proper bone setup (one bone for moving the head as a solid and another bone jutting out to the jaw to move the lower jaw and lower teeth spearately.
All this works perfectly and smoothly
Now i need to create blend shapes for the facial animation
i have 2 qs. ..
1) I'm using wire deformers this time instead of the usual cluster based deforemations I use .
Is it possible to paint the weights of each wire deformer on the face instead of manually using the edit membership tool.
I used to use the Paint Cluster weights tool which works great with black and white values
Qs> How do i edit the wire defomer to have a softer effect of pulling vertices and maually remove vertices without having to use holders and influence wires

2) How do u people duplicate the geometry for setting up the different blend shapes - I need to duplicate the first geometry along with the deformation effects setup to it so that i dont have to do it again and again. (used duplicate upstream graph / input connections et al but didnt work - probably...defintely doing something wrong )

Bonus qs whats the best method u follow for setting up the facial animation and the process?

Thanks all for even reading this far. Big thanks to all who reply

the miragemaker
Mmmmm.........forbidden Doh-nut ......

[cinemafan1980]

I don't know the answers to all of your questions, but I do know some.
1) Wire deformers are not "weighted deformers", so points deformed by them are either in or or out of the set membership, there are no weights. You can use the "paint set membership tool" under the deform menu to add and remove points from the wire set. You can soften the effect of a wire deformer by increasing the "Dropoff Distance" variable of the deformer in the channels box.

2) You can make copies of geometry with its deformers by saving a version of your maya scene file that only contains the geometry and deformers to be duplicated, then importing that scene file into your working scene. Maybe this isn't the best way to do it, but it's the only way I know. I'm no expert though, so you might find someone who knows a better way (maybe a custom script.) If you do, please let me know about it .