I may be right out to lunch with this whole idea, but here was my plan...
My character is a one piece mesh, but I want to create a blendshape for just a small part of her. Specifically the mouth region. Since everything I've seen on blendshapes seems to indicate that the entire mesh must be calculated for the morph to work, I thought I would do a duplicate face operation on the region of the mouth, create a wrap deformer from the resulting geometry, and then make blendshapes to sculpt the wrap deformer.
While I was setting it all up, doing my sculpting etc. everything was fine, but as soon as I tried to do anything to my character's skeleton, things really started to drag. Maya was taking upwards of 30 to 45 seconds to simply rotate a joint.
My figure is a polygonal mesh, and it's really not that dense, or anything.
Is my entire plan not going to work, or is there a way to streamline things so Maya isn't doing a bunch of (what seems to me) superfluous calculating?
Or, are wrap deformers just a math heavy operation when combined with a skeleton?
Or maybe there's another way to do what I'm trying to do -- create blendshapes that don't have to calculate the entire mesh? I was doing this to speed things up afterall. It seems wasteful to have a blendshape of the entire figure when I just want to make phonemes.
Thanks if you can help.
Greg