I’ve got this female mesh rigged, weight painted, and finally was going to add some blendshapes for all the mouth movements (instead of relying on rig to do that.)
Her mouth was sculpted to be open, now I need it closed. I smoothed the mesh because this doesn’t need to be super low polygon and there was some bad geometry in the original but now it’s kind of a pain to work with.
Guess I could close her mouth by rigging a temporary jaw bone, sculpting in zbrush, or just biting the bullet and re-meshing her as a low polygon with the correct geometry.
Really Zbrush would probably be the best option, I could do all the facial features with what will ideally be more “organic” then what you’d usually get from moving vertices in Maya but without being able to change the number of polygons it’s kind of a pain to work with.
To close the mouth you can simply do a soft selection and move the vertex. Otherwise you could use the freehand tools of the graphite toolbox of 3ds max.
For the blendshapes Zbrush is the best and it doesn’t change the number of polygons. Just use GOZ plugin for Zbrush to go back and forth between 3DS Max and Zbrush, remember to clone the object before sending it to Zbrush because it mess the stacks and material attachment, UV remains but I think it lose the weights so it’s ok just for blendshapes.
Another cool trick I just learns, is that you can lower the polygons with Zremesher then reproject the skin weights to the new mesh using the modifier Skin Wrap. Zremesher does a wonderful job on the topology and for finer details you could recreate them by hand( it does mess up small details like mouth or eyes).
