2009

Table Of Contents
TIP After you create a blend shape, you can optionally hide or delete a target
object (in this lesson, smilingFace and raisedBrow). If you delete a target, you
improve Maya processing time but lose the capability to manipulate the
cluster handle. For versatility, many animators hide the target rather than
delete it. Hiding the target is necessary when you render the scene. It is also
useful when you want to unclutter the scene view.
Beyond the lesson
In this lesson, you learned how to:
Use two clusters and a blend shape deformer to manipulate facial
expressions.
In professional productions, its common to create several more clusters
with a blend shape deformer for finer control of facial expressions. For
example, you can create clusters for a number of mouth positions that you
can use to simulate the phonemes of speech.
When you used certain blend shape slider values, you may have noticed
that the face looked good in all regions except for a few vertices. To fix
such regions, delete the cluster, move the problem vertices of the target
face to a better position, then create a blend shape for the improved target
face.
As much as possible, use a target shape thats not extremely different from
the base shape. If you need to use an extremely different target shape,
create a blend shape with multiple targets. Each of the multiple targets
must have a shape that is progressively more like the extreme target shape.
Beyond the lesson | 345