Morph and Deformation Help

andykarta

Hi.  I've been planning to make my own expressions using Blendshapes in Maya for the genesis 2 model.  But I think I'm going to need to apply morphs before I apply facegen or other existing deformation like fat/thin which will change where the points are and effect the deformation too much.  Also, I'd really rather not have to retarget the blendshapes for every character I make.  Ideally I'd like to do it once for a gen 2 male and once for a gen 2 female and be done with it.  I don't mind making them in Daz though I don't think there's soft selection or the alphas I'd like to use.  So a Maya or Zbrush or Cinema 4d solution would be ideal.

I'd like to get rid of the facial deformers as a whole (except for the phonetic ones)  and just use my own which would be more basic stretching and squooshing.  

1  Anyone ever do that?  If so what wisdom can you give me.  

2  How do you delete deformers.  I obviously want to have them on my default gen 2 model.

3  Is there a way of doing it without retargeting a finished model that I've facegened and applied other deformation to.

 

Also...what's the Daz term for the face expression change things?    Morphs?  Deformers?  Blendshapes? Poodles?  I went to a Daz website where they called them morphs (because of Franz Kafka evidently).  But they were also sprinkling around other terms.  Cinema calls them polymorphs which I thought was an evil alien in Red Dwarf.  Maya, Zbrush, and 3D coat call them blendshapes.  It's just confusing.  Why didn't I decide to do 2D animation?

 

 

Richard Haseltine

2. isn't possible, though you can of course choose not to use the standard morphs.

The term for a blendshape in DS is morph, not sure if that's for Kafka or Tony Hart's little friend. dFormers are like poser magnets - procedural distortions of the mesh. Joints are also deformers.

I'm not sure what you are trying to do though - the order in which morphs are applied is irrelevant to the outcome, each morph just slides the vertices along a line between the base point and the fully morphed point so applying several morphs justs tacks a bunch of translations, which are commutative.