Trouble Applying Blend Shapes

[Anonymous]

Hi eveyone, I have come across another problem that I would really appreciate some help with. So I am currently creating the shape blends for the faces of the character I'm rigging and following along with George Maestri in his tutorial on Lynda.com. I just spent a few hours creating all of my face shapes and tried applying them with Blend Shape but it comes up with an error saying that "there is no deformable objects selected". I noticed in the video when George slects the head of his character, the head is a seperate geometry from the body; where as my character's head is attached to the body. Do you think that this is the problem, and if so, how can I correct it? Plus if I do end up seperating the head from the body..will it stilll function with the joints and body geometry of my rig corretly? I attached a screenshot, but I can provide more information if needed.

Just an FYI, I haven't smooth bound the geometry to the joints yet because that's in the next chapter of the tutorial and I didn't want to go out of order. Thank you in advanced for all of your help! The sooner the better...I would like to move past this point in the next day if at all possible 🙂

Here is the tutorial link (it requires membership i think): http://www.lynda.com/Maya-tutorials/Applying-blend-shapes/92564/98797-4.html

[Calebos]

Hi,

 your problem is different topology of targets and base geometry. The blendShape tool works the best and smoothly with "check topology" option on(it is the default vaue). So it works as a simple interpolation.

What you need to do is copy your base mesh and make all targets again with snapping certain vertices to its place with reference head target meshes you already made and this is a bit long task or you can make it a bit quicker way with wrap method:

1. if you have the base mesh of your head you have used for source of creating targets. I mean the base head mesh without any shape tweak for your expressions, etc. ...      make the BlendShape for this mesh as the base and use your already made targets. As I can see from your picture: 28 targets.

2. your base head mesh with created BlendShape should stay on the place of the head of your WHOLE character mesh

3. now Wrap Tool as the main trick. 

4. select all vertices of the head on your WHOLE character mesh and make the quick select set from that selection: Create -> Sets -> Quick select set.

5. now select(you have to be in OBJECT mode, NOT in the COMPONENT mode) member vertices from your quick select set(the best method is to open Outliner, click on the quick select set and with RMB Select set members so you select all vertices you need. Now select(again in the Outliner) with Ctrl+LMB your whole mesh of the character and go to animation menu and create Wrap.

6. So now you have just head part of your whole character mesh influenced by the head mesh with the Blendshape node.

7. Go to BlendShape Editor and try to turn on all targets just to be sure all works as purposed. You should see just the part changing.

8. At last for each BlendShape target just set its appropriate value to 1 and copy the main mesh. It will create the target for whole character mesh.

PS: be aware not to combine two target values at once so it will produce "combined" geometry