You may run into a few problems when you try to blendshape the nose. When you apply a blendshape you can only do it to one object so to blendshape the face you would have to combine the nose and face then blendshape the entire lot.
This however can cause when texturing you have to be careful with the uv's because you basicaly merge the two uv maps together.
You also have to be careful with your history and pivots when you parent objects and animate them, things can rotate on their own.
Another problem with parenting the nose is that if you wanted to do a nose twitch (bewitched style) it would look unrealistic when the nose is unattached because no skin around the nose would deform and you would need a bone for the nose.
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The only reason eyes are generally parented is because all they have to do is rotate on a local axis so you can target them to a locator and move the locator around which is simplier in animation.
I dont know what you mean by having the mouth as a seperate piece, i think it is often done with blendshapes of the face, you can use the membership tool in the deeformers menu to have a blendshape to apply to only certain vertexs of the entire model ( in this case the mouth). I know it can be done with bones in the face but i've had no experience with this method.
There are definetly peices of a character that you could simply attach but you have to be careful and plan what that will do in an animation because if you change your mind during animation to change it means changing a whole lot of things, so plan ahead.
hope it helps to clear things up
Thanks for wasting your time reading this line.
Last edited by mumbojumbo_13; 11-06-2005 at 12:15 PM.