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# 4 31-12-2006 , 05:06 AM
LauriePriest's Avatar
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Join Date: May 2003
Location: London
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Inbetweening blendshapes is very usefull for getting arcs in your animatoins, for example instead of having one smile shape which may look very flat and linier you can add inbetweens which will add arcs into your animation and make it a little more exciting.
This is especially true with cartoony work.

Making the inbetweens:
This can of course be done manually with vert tweaking but i find this method gives me a more reliable result:
The method i use is to make a temporary rig inside the face so i can animate my character smiling or squinting easily.
I then do quick, rough animations of the expressions i want to make, far more intuative than doing guess work by vertex tweaking.
I then use the animation snapshot tool to generate my inbetweens meshes for the facial expression.

A method to combine the blendshapes into one slider:
I then create normal blendshapes out of these objects, but to unify them into one slider you can allways do somthing with Set driven key. For example lets say my smile blend shapes has an end shape and two inbetweens, i could make a new attribute on a controller that goes from 0-15 called smile and have this control drive the envelope of the blend shapes.

So when this new value is at 5 my first inbetween would be in full effect while the others would be off, and at the value of 10 the second and on 15 the full blend shape would be in full power.

I hope that makes sense?