lattices and facial animation
 

Hi i'm new to maya and just come from xsi, Its my first post and I feel abit bad asking a question for my first sorry i'll try to answer some when i get to grips with it.
I recently spent a few days at aardman CG dept and they use maya and one of the guys showed me a really cool thing they use but I can't remember how to do it.
I was wanting to know how I set up blend shapes on a face but with the face having a lattice attached, the reason for this being you can really quickly put the blend shapes in position then fine tune by moving vertices. Also I want the lattice still attached so when i skin it i have the skeleton skinned to the lattice which controls the model. This means that when i skin it i can key frame the lattice points to control the model if anything looks abit wrong, say when i move an arm i can use the lattice to make a muscle bulge. Hope this makes sense, sorry for the long explanation.
I don't need to know all this I know about skinning a blend shapes just how to duplicate the first model with the lattice so the new lattice affects the new model and the parenting structure for the group. Or does anyone know any tutorials on this subject
Anyhelp would be greatly apprieciated.

If all you want to do is duplicate a mesh with a lattice, then it's simply a matter of selecting Duplicate Input Grpah in the duplicate options.

However, if you add a lattice to a skined character and skin the lattice as well you will get a double transform. To stop this you have to tick the Freeze Geometry tick box in the lattice attributes.

Richard

thanks alot i'll give it a try