Shapes vs blendshape

[szabolcsmatefy7891]

I'd love to see the Softimage shape system in Maya. In Softimage the blendshapes are stored in weightmaps. When you changed the basemesh, or topology, the changes propagated to all the shapes as well. So adding an extra edge loop didn't make you work on each shape targets.

[nunoconceicao]

Also the ShapeManager is quite handy to create, tweak and manage all the shapes for the character

[Christoph_Schaedl]

you don have to redo that on all targets...
just use bake topopoly to target..
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BFPAIU8hwQ4

and to manage blendshapes and inbetweens you could use the soup morph node...
http://www.soup-dev.com/tools.htm

Morph is fast, multithreaded and memory efficient blend shape deformer that can handle thousands of targets with ease. It can be used for pre-deformation blend shapes and post- deformation corrective shapes.

[nunoconceicao]

I've seen the videos you posted (thanks for that by the way) and this is a good example of how some things in maya are not so straight forward as in softimage.

So basically the bake topology function should at least recognize the tweak operations instead of having to rely on a trick to get it propagated through the other shapes.

You shouldnt even need to use the bake topology in the first place  or rely on a plugin to manage things (in soft any changes of topology or tweaks are automatically taken care of in the blendshapes).

After re-reading the group directive from Jill i think this workflow fits in:

b) the feature/workflow equivalent exists, but is more convoluted and/or less efficient;

[andrewsilke]

The SHAPES plugin (commercial 50€) is a must have inside of maya

Full symetrical slider mirroring, easy edit, renaming, manager editor, proper correctives for joints, combination correctives, pose space deformation, driven key/PSD auto corrective setup, send to sculpt package features and much more. 

http://www.braverabbit.de/playground/?page_id=1001