Hi, everyone! sorry to bother you, but I need some advice. I use Blender and bear with me because I’m new to modeling and rigging (I’m just fresh from a few courses)…
Anyway, let me explain my predicament: I need to create a model character (human) which will have a lot of shape keys for facial animation (Facial expressiveness will indeed be the most important characteristic of this character). But at the same time, I’ll need to make the same model/character in other variations (specially differently clothed versions), and if possible keep the model in the least amount of meshes (or even a single mesh)…
Now, my question is, is there a way to reuse or transfer the shapekeys between the variations of the model? or should I just separate the head and slap it on the other bodies? I must be honest and say I’ve never worked on characters made of different meshes so I don’t have a clue how that would affect rigging and weighting and stuff (or the fact that I’d probably have to redo bones and weighting in all bodies anyway?)…
So, is there a way to make this kind of process less painful? Are there any techniques or workflows I’m not aware of, that could assist me with this?
Anyways, I’d like to know how you guys would approach this situation, so any advice would be greatly appreciated.
How drastic are the variations? Can you model them as shape keys themselves instead of using different meshes? e.g. a shape key to make a character bulkier/thinner.
If the changes are drastic and have to modeled as different meshes, then off with his/her head! Use the same head on different bodies and save on verts.
But keep on eye on performance. Too many shape keys is as bad as too many verts.
“Too many shape keys is as bad as too many verts.”-- Wow, I didn’t know that, thanks for the heads up! But yeah it would be mostly changes of garments (i.e.: swim suit, casual pants and shirt, fancy dress, kimono, funny mascot suit, etc). The amount of shape keys is still not decided but it might be from 6 to 10+ expressions. You think it will help that she is the only character who’ll have that many facial expressions? By the way, I assume I will need to re-rig the head to each body, right? Is there anything I need to be aware of when weighting a separated body part? or should I just merge the neck area into each new body? Again, sorry for the noob questions but I’ve only worked with single mesh models until now…
You can transfer shape keys from one model to another, either by vertice index or by topology, it’s on the black downwards arrow in the shape key group in blender. In most cases you can add and remove vertices in the base mesh but as a rule of thumb you should only do blend shape when you have the final model. For example you should be fine adding the rest of the body for your character but merging the neck vertices might cause them to lose the blend shape information in all blend shapes.
So, in other words, I should do a base model, use it to create the variations, then create the shape keys on one model and transfer them to the other models?