Maya Animation :: Adding Blend Shapes To Existing Rig
Jul 16, 2011
I have a rigged object and I would like to add a blend shape to this rig. Now my blend shape is not for morph animation rather it is for manipulating the original geometry. Put it this way, I modified the original object and I would like to put this new shape in place without changing my rig, or transferring weights or bones. I presume that best would be to put this before the rig deformer so that the bone deformer works on top of it? I am not sure how I should handle or approach this.
so i know if you want two blend shapes to happen at the same time they have to be in the same node.but what if i want 2 separate nodes? say: one for body shape, one for face shape a blink, and an inflated belly, that i want to happen at the same time? I don't want it to be all in one node, but 1 cancels out the other depending on the order.
I have a rigged human character with many corrective blend shapes, which sometimes overwrite each other. For example, the corrective blend shape on the finger, when activated, "un-does" the corrective blend shape on the elbow, when both the finger and the elbow are bent.
I have tried the input editor, and can change which blend shapes overwrite what other blend shapes, but they still overwrite each other.
My next step is to try and paint the areas which the blend shape affects (stop the finger blend shape from being applied to the elbow). However, when accessing the "Paint Blend Shape Weights" tool, most of the target blends do not appear in the list. Two target blends do appear, but the two which appear are seemingly random and have nothing that sets them apart from the other blend shapes which do not appear.
When creating new blend shapes from the same base mesh, the new blend shapes also do not not appear in the target blend list.
When attempting to duplicate the problem (with several cubes), the issue is not present.
How to prevent the blend shapes from overwriting each other, or how to fix the issue with the targets not appearing in the paint blend shape weights list? Attached is a screen grab of some of my blend shapes visible in the blend shape editor on the right, and them not being present in the paint blend shapes weights list on the left.
How can I change the range at which blend shapes are created? In other words, blend shapes are created with ranges from 0.0 to 1.0. How could I change it to, for example, -0.4 to 4 without using a custom attribute?
I'm aware I can type -0.4 or 4 in a blend shape target. However, that will mutiply the effect which is not desirable.
I've recently upgraded from Maya 7 (32-bit Windows XP) to Maya 2010 (64-bit Windows XP). In Maya 7, I used corrective blend shapes to fine tune skin deformations by the bones of a character's skeleton. I used Parallel blending, and it all worked very nicely.
I've been trying to do exactly the same thing in Maya 2010, and it works fine with the character in its default 'T' position. If I then try to pose the character, the corrections become progressively worse the more extreme the pose.
I'm using the same technique as I did in Maya 7, so I'm wondering if something has broken.
I want to rig a face for animating. (not for a game). and I can't figure out which is better and why: having all joints, and those joints driving parts of the face.. or just making blend shapes for all expressions like smile, angry, sad etc....
I know blend shapes won't work for games, but I'm planning to do mmo's anyways so I'll never need a complicated joint setup for faces... but as far as film, what works better?
I need to Import Maya blend shapes into Unity without using the bake animation is the blend shapes are needed to be useable in Unity. I have not been successful so fare. The method can be either by FBX with the rig or any other method!
does Mudbox support FBX with a Maya blendShape node? I have a face with hundreds of blend shapes on an active node in Maya, will Mudbox support this as FBX import? If so, are there some settings I need to be aware of?
So I was in the midst of making blend-shapes for an animated wizards staff, but one leaf wouldn't deform like the rest.
I know I selected the vertices properly when altering it, but every time I try to create a blend shape deformer I get the error "Error:// no deformable object selected.
I have a scene with an object with multiple blend shape targets. I'm not using custom attributes to control these targets (since doing that makes the Blend Shape Editor nonfunctional). I'm just directly changing the value in the channel box's 'Input' section, under 'blendShape1'. By typing in the number directly, I can get it to work with any number I want, but if I try the Maya Cntrl-drag method to interactively change the number, I'm stuck between values of 0 and 1. Is there any way to change the min and max of these attributes? Its strange that I can type in whatever I want and it will work, but cntrl-dragging does not work that way.
I'm rigging a character for use in Maya 2011, which I'm not all too familiar with - How would I link the blend shape states for 2 objects, so when I increase the value of one blend shape for one object, it increases the value for another blend shape for another object?
I have a blend shape for the mouth open position & I need the teeth & tongue open blends to match as the value increases.
In 3DS Max I'd use the reaction manager - is there something similar for Maya?
I created a flat polygon shape (object) and attached it to a motion path (curve). I then created a Animation Snapshot. So, my question is, why are the shapes bunched up at the beginning and end of the Animation Snapshot render ... instead of being all equally spaced?
I've been trying to feel out the pipeline for creating HIK rigs and jumping back and forth between Maya and Motion Builder. In Mobu, there is a way to add prop joints to a character's definition, but I haven't found a way to do so in Maya.
What I have done, is created the joints as necessary, and then created custom controls that the prop joints are constrained to. It's a simple parent constraint, so nothing too tricky. However, when I go to File-> Send to Motion Builder, the joints that are constrained are offset from their proper positions by a distance similar to their offset from the origin of the scene. The only way to get them back, is to turn off the effects of the parent constraints.
The controllers, and constraints transferred into Mobu fine, it seems. So I'm not sure where the discrepancy is. It would be ideal to be able to add these joints into the characterization step in Maya, to simply move them about with FK controls. What the best way to set this up would be? Is there a way to add prop definitions to a character in Maya?
While the original question remains, I found that the prop controls I had in my scene, were off from their proper positions, by the exact relative amount from the origin in the maya scene. Even though I froze transformations on the controls, coming into Mobu, they were put back on somehow. After selecting them, and setting their trans values to 0,0,0, they were put back into the correct position.
I have rigged a character and made it into a character set in which i have locked the scaling attribute , I have then saved this file. I have then referenced this file and and have done a walk cycle animation and saved this file. I have then realised that I needed the scaling attribute when I have added other parts of my scene. Is there a way to unlock the scaling attribute in my walk cycle animation file or will i have to go back and change it in the rigged file, create a new character set and do the walk cycle animation again?
My current scene has 10 animation layers for a character, and seeing every f-curve from all layers, although grey and locked, when I only need to see the f-curves in layer I'm working on is really cluttering the graph editor. My current work around is selecting my active layer in the Layer Editor every time I select a rig control. Simple enough, but a pretty inefficient way of working. I can't seem to find a setting that allows me to just see ONLY the fcurves in the active layer. I imagine some of you out there may have hundreds of animations for a single game character.
I'm trying to animate a moving rope based on simulation data. I know how to import my motion data for individual objects.I've seen lots of tutorials where one uses simulations or soft bodies with IK in order to create a rope. how to use all these features and I want the rope to follow my coordinates exactly. I was hoping I could do something like the following:
1. create points in Maya which correspond to my data points 2. connect the points with a curve 3. loft a circle using the curve as a path in order to make a rope 4. move the points. due to History, the rope position is updated
Is there a way to do something like this in Maya? I've tried, and it looks like ep points do not have key-able channel data, so I can't create animations for them separately. I'm using .mov data file imports to generate x, y, and z motion keys for the points.
I have an assignment for a class where part of the final project is detailing the construction of a mold for a part. The animation that I would like to do would show the build up of the part in a 3D printer layer by layer. The closest method of animating this that I can think of is unfortunately backwards.
As I would have the part and a camera facing up from the bottom of the part and would have a plane that would recede upwards in the y direction. This would reveal the part as the plane translates in the y direction.
This might be okay, but the problem is that I would like to show this from a camera on top facing down instead of a camera on bottom facing up. How I can create the look of a part being built up in this additive method?
I have photoshop 6.0, trouble with blending 2 images. I wanna know how do I place the texture above the image. So that says that the Texture is Layer 2 and the real image is the backround.
I am trying to add an expression to the standard Mudbox car to make the wheels turn when the vehicle moves in both the X & Z dimension. I have found many scripts that let me do this in a single dimension. I have found some others that claim to work for both dimensions, but at certain angles the wheels turn in the wrong direction.
My work flow is as follows: 1 - Export car from Mudbox to Maya 2 - Separate the wheels & center pivot all items 3 - Add NurbsCurves to create a rig 4 - Parenting the elements of the car 5 - Add an expression based on this web post [URL]....... 6 - Test the animation
It works great when translating the car in the Z axis, but when the car is rotated 95 degrees in the Y axis the wheel will only go backwards no matter which direction the car is moved.
I have attached an MB (Maya 2013) so you can see the
translate facial motion capturing data (basically 2d point clouds) to blendshape weights. I finished rigging my character and wanted to drive my blendshapes by the relative position of my tracking data, e.g. distance between corners of the mouth drive the "wide" blendshape and so on...
Hope YOU know a solution for this, I believe blendshapes are THE way to create realism in tracked animation but I was not able to find ANY reference to something like that. I'd like it to be customizable and not to expensive, so the imagemetrics faceware service won't do for me
How come baking some part of animation in graph editor deletes everything before and after the part i bake and how can i bake that part while leaving the rest untouched?
I have a character with animation. Another character is the same(same bones, meshes), but with no animation, 100 times larger in size and I resize the head to make the head looks slimmer. They are saved in different fbx files and I imported them into mb scenes. I select the root bone and "select hierarchy", the export options is shown below. Then select in the same way in the larger character's scene, the importer options is shown below. THE PROBLEM is: after I import the atom, the character becomes shrinked to the same size as the former one and the ratio of head becomes the same as the former one too.
For some scenes we have a chain which is wrapped around several cogs, just like a bicycle. In this scenario we need the chain links to follow the path and retain their relationship to each other.
In other scenes we have a chain which follows along a changing path. Imagine this if you can: A heavy weight has a chain attached which goes vertically up, over a pulley and down the other side where it is attached to a lorry. The lorry drives off pulling the weight upwards. This is my challenge!
Should I individually constrain the links using a Pin constraint and use dynamics completely to keep the chain taught?
Was wondering if there is a way of getting random camera movements? For example, i am doing a fly through of an earthquake scene and as the camera animates along the street it randomly shakes with the earthquake shocks.
I know I could animate it by hand but I wondered if there was a way (perhaps an expression) to make it more simple?
