How to animate the mouth

# 1 28-11-2007 , 01:00 AM

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Hi I´m still doing my animation project for my studies. Now I finished the modeling part of bart simpson(I know he doesn´t look really good but I´m really new to maya and don´t have much time).
So I would like to animate the mouth. I thought about the opinion to realize it via blendshapes, however I get stuck in tranforming him to get his mouth closed. When I do it, it looks really inorganic.

Would be nice if anyone of you guys got any suggests. Also what I could maybe improve.

Thanks a lot

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# 2 28-11-2007 , 09:59 AM

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What I sometimes do is select a few vertices around the mouth and create clusters (under deformation) on the selected vertices. Then I move them around to wehre I want them and adjust the weights of each vertices under component editors>weight deformation tab. I erase the history and the clusters and make a blendshape. THere are many ways, this is one of them.

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# 3 28-11-2007 , 11:49 AM

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Okay thanks I will try it.
I still got another problem because the whole body including the head is made out of one polygon. Is there any posibility to create the blender just for the head.

Sorry for asking so much, maybe silly, questions but no one in my university can really help me and I didn´t find anything via google.

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# 4 28-11-2007 , 11:59 AM

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you can't, since it's all one mesh it needs to keep all that info for the deformation. I'm sure you already saw the deformation gets messed up or it doesn't read the mesh when you create a blendshape, if you delete the faces of the body. It's a hassle but that's why you should create a layer for your blendshapes and hide the visibility once you're done. That's why I use clusters for the deformation.

FOr example, when I want to create a blink for the eyes i create 2 clusters for each eye, a total of 4 for both eyes. One for the top lid and another for the bottom lid. Then I change the pivot, for each cluster, to the center of the eyeball and rotate the cluster according, so that the lids close and then adjust the weights on each vertice through the component editor so I can get a nice deformation when the lids close. Much more simple than blendshapes. After I'm done adjusting the weights, I'll use set driven keys to control the clusters via a Curve control. That way I don't have to open up the blendshapes window when I want to animate the blink.

EA Games

Last edited by djknucklez1; 28-11-2007 at 12:11 PM.

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