adding blendshapes to a finished rig

[wjhamilton]

Hello all,

I bought a plugin called the setupmachine which does rigging and automatic weighting to biped characters, which works great except that it does a really simplistic rig for the face (no lower jaw or anything, you can just rotate the head but can't open the mouth or whatnot). I'd love to use this plugin because other then the face it does a terrific job of rigging, and as such was wondering if it's possible to make blendshapes for a face after something has been rigged and weighted.
Ideally what I want to be able to do for a general workflow is to use the setupmachine plugin to do all the rigging for the body of my character, do all the rigging for the face by hand using the techniques off of the face rigging dvds from digital tutors, and then combine them both to get one complete fully rigged mesh. Thanks again for any help

-William

[Jak_Carver]

hm...good question. When rigging in Maya I always would setup everything from the start, I never rigged the body and weighted it and then decided to also add facial bones so I cant say for sure if it is possible, initially I would say no because Maya is so linear and I can see this causing problems, however because I have never been in that situation I cant say for certain. I do know that in XSI you rig a character and if later you want to model a tail or something and add bones to the rig and weight it while leaving everything else alone you can because of the non destructive worklow, but Maya is not this flexible. In Maya, try to plan ahead to avoid situations like these. Try to add some facial bones and see what happens. If Maya destroys your rig and character then at least you know for sure never to go down that path again, thats what I would do.

[shk1101]

Hello all,

was wondering if it's possible to make blendshapes for a face after something has been rigged and weighted.

-William

Yes, it is possible. : )

[wjhamilton]

Thanks for the fast replys!
I'll play around with it a little more then to see if I can get anything, but it turns out that the people who make setupmachine are also making something to automate face rigging http://www.rafhashvideotapes.com/lib/rafhashvideotapes/facedemo2.mov
I need more practice with modeling so I'll probably focus on that and then learn how to rig characters using the plugin mentioned when it gets released.