quick Q' about blend shape...
 

Hi, I know this is short and quick...there is something I want to know and make sure before starting anything. Ok, the question is...Before doing the blend shapes, do I smooth the character first then blend shape it or is it possible to blend shape first while it's not smooth and smooth it afterwards? Answers are much appreciated.

hi

you can apply smooth afterwards :)

I did do that...however when I played around with blending shaping, it takes forever to move the mouth...the screen slows up. I'm guessing could be my graphic card or when I looked at the poly count, my character is smoothed and says I have about 20k something...isn't that too much? I'm making a short clip fyi. One thing too, if I were to make a movie at what poly count I should be having normally? I know that for games is around 5k and use soft/harden, something like that.

Thanks.

after applying a smooth, you can take the smooth's divisions down to 0 in the channel box which essentially "removes" the smooth.

Animate like normal and then, before rendering, increase the divisions back up to what you want.

Ok, I just put it down to zero and turns out that some of the skin goes off but when in smooth the skin is normal as I want it to be. Do I need to repaint the weights or something?

Thanks, that became helpful...hell, why didn't I knew that b4?

i guess you can just leave it if it's ok in smooth skin mode? since that's what really matters at rendering time ...

haven't really had that happen to me before tho...

Hey, I have another thing to make sure. Can you do this in exact order and that the blend shape won't get mess up when you animate. First blend shape the object, then create another object and combine the objects together, then animate...should work no problem right?

Thanks.

possibly. If it does give you any grief, you can change Maya'd deformation order to make it work.

http://forum.simplymaya.com/showthre...ormation+order