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Blender Adventures Part 5

Posted on: Sunday, 9 November 2014 @ 2:08pm
Blatting about
More specifically

Still shape keying.  Base is partially amused.

Rubberlips can almost smile!

So far I've got all of a left eye wink and a half smile.  Once I got the left half smile right and figure out where the eyelashes go I'll mirror those shape keys and then do some really basic expression parts around happy, sad, angry and surprise which generally use the entire face.  Then make some phonemes with help from this useful phoneme shape guide someone had thoughtfully thrown at the internet.

Sculpt mode is awesome for shape keying.

I've spent a couple of weeks on and off trying to get bone driven shape keys to work with no luck.  The driver attaches but I keep either getting values over 1 or under 0 depending on which way I want to move the driver and they only change the number by miniscule amounts.  I tried changing the min and max numbers on the shape keys themselves to see if that would help and got some fun poltergeist activity (the directions flipped so when I tried to move a point up, it went down, and left when I moved it right, and some other stuff I can't recall off the top of my head now) so I set it back to min of 0 and max of 1 and everything went back to normal.  I can deal with sliders in the side panel thingi, not really any different to what I was doing before.

Also had to grab the coordinates from a previous version as my model had accidentally moved at some point while I'd been mucking around and was no longer "symmetrical" and the eyes looked weird (the eyeballs live on their own layer so I really notice when the model has moved) and fix it.

Next thing will be some really basic textures and hair (partly so I can see where the eyelashes are for the eye shape keys and mostly so I can figure out how to do it) and then I'll trot along to the next mode.  Probably the Dragonkin at this stage as I'm more game to tackle the prehensile tail rig than feathers.

Oh yeah and I did say I'd post a video of the rig test when I finished the rig so better not forget to do that too.

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rolandixor Monday, 10 November 2014 @ 9:30am [Permalink]
This may come as a shock, but I'm yet to wrap my head around shape keying. Mainly because my old system made animation of anything but a moving block absolutely impossible (well, more like, frustrating).I had it figured out when it was first introduced, but haven't used it much since then.
bek Monday, 10 November 2014 @ 10:55am [Permalink]
Roland Taylor Tuesday, 11 November 2014 @ 3:19am [Permalink]
Yeah I got a new system (woo hoo) finally!I did a few animals that I wanted to animate, but never bothered to. They would definitely benefit from shape keys for certain things. Actually so would vehicles, especially furistic vehicles that can change shape.Once I get settled in, I'll be diving into this one :)
bek Tuesday, 11 November 2014 @ 10:42pm [Permalink]

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