Thursday 7th March 2013

I needed a lot of help again today. To start off with, I was told I needed to add weights to my model by 'painting' on it. Essentially, it's to highlight areas that will be most animated and so this makes it easier. The brightest white areas are ones that will be affected most, and where it is black it won't be affected at all.

This is a blendshape that was created for me in the last taught session. The sliders will help me easily animate and switch between mouth shapes.









I tried to have a go at making one for myself, but for a long while I was stuck on this as I wasn't sure how to change the mouth shape. I then found out that it's just a simple matter of using the move tool on vertices and adjusting the mouth that way. The soft brush tool (which is shown here) allows me to select more than one vertex at a time.

 This is the end result of my own blendshape experiment. It's an "Ah" shape. I have several duplicate heads that I have attached a blendshape to, then selected the main head last so it is the parent. I will use the different heads to give me the different mouth shapes that I need.






It was also pointed out to me today that my topology for my face wasn't correct. The areas around the mouth and eyes should have been circular topology. Apparently, this will makes things easier to animate and create mouth shapes. However, I have decided to carry on with my model as it is, as I feel I've come too far with my model to go back and I need to use my time for animating.