Dave

Will you hit me on the head for a moment ... omigosh... of course there's Liquify command in Photoshop CS3 so that's a big YAHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO for me. I played around with it for a moment on Saturday and I especially like the Pixel Distort feature (the first button). Hi hi .. now I can do it just like in the UTube tutorial. I'm pretty excited.


And of course how daft of me. You can use Blendshapes and still stimulate the muscles...duh! I'm going to do that in my animations later. Just that I'm worried if my PC can take it as I'm working with high polycounts and with BS, you need to make several duplicate copies of the same head. I think I'll stick with a pair at a time for any individual ma or mb scenes. Thanks for that slick advise. :-)


A couple of questions :-


1. I displayed Polycount details with Display-->Heads Up but I can't get one figure that says what's my polycount. Maya's giving me couple of numbers for Tris, Vertices, Edges, Quads. Which number says what my polycount is ?


2. I know Relax and Merge can reduce the polycounts. I tried that but Maya says I haven't "Prepared" my mesh. I clicked Prepared but I still can't get it to Relax. I can use Merge but I don't want to be selecting individual edges one by one and merge - there hundreds of thousands of them. Is there anyway I can reduce polygon count in one go. I have several high quality but high polycount meshes (one face and one robot) which I need to reduce the complexity as my PC frequently crashes as I work on it.



OK I'm going to UV my ass off now with actual photos I get from the Internet!!! Will post them when I'm done and compare with the black man's head I did using purely Maya's native shaders. I dunno...you tend to lose the sharpness in the skin and eyes with UV..maybe I'll do the eyes separately. I'm pretty excited with UV now!

There's a new brilliant UV tut on The Making of The Potrait of Sheikh Zayed. You should check it out.

P.S. >> Have you decided where to take your kids yet for the hols ?

Cheers
EZANI