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I had a quick question about a sub-divided model I'm working on in Maya 5. I've made a few dozen heads for blend shapes and I'm not sure if I should attach each head to it's own body or keep them separate surfaces. Normally, I'd have the neck disappear into a shirt or something, but this is a girl in a bikini so there's no place to hide a seam...it has to appear to be one fluid surface. Will having it all be one surface bog down the animation? Any suggestions?
Thanks,
Travis
A good way of dealing with this is planning ahead. You know that you want to have an animation. You know that she will have facial expressions.
So...
Duplicate the whole body and work on facial expressions.
You can work on character animation on a simple mesh. You can even do this in a completely different scene file to the finished file. As long as the skeleton has the same naming system, you can just save the skeleton animation and load it up into the finished version. It wont effect your working speed in any way :)
Something that you may want to have a think about is not using true SubD for blendshapes. It runs very slowly. I found that if you extract the proxy mesh as a standard polygon mesh, it works much quicker. You work with low poly objects and then at the last moment you just throw a smooth on top. Although it requires a bit more work and a bit more practice, the speed increase is definitely worth it.
I have read of another way of dealing with selective blendshapes. You can have a whole body, and then just duplicate the head. You just work on blendshapes and then use Sets as the blendshape targets. Some friends and I tried it in our class, but we only got it to work once. I may have a better look into it soon, as if it works properly, it would be sweet :D