Giving it 110%

Sporting metaphors really shouldn't apply to skin weighting but they seem to with Maya's weight painting brush. With the weight brush you can add more than 100% of value to a given vert. I've spent the last few days in the component editor correcting the values assigned to pretty much every vertice in the face. After a littler more tuning to the cheeks/checck bones and nasal folds I'll be ready to overwrite the Heavy_Reference file and move on to the Heavy_Rig file. I'm going to be grafting on rig controls for the face, set driven keys for the visemes and some blend shapes for visemes that are difficult to hit rather than adjusting the topology further and adding more bones.



















All in all it's coming along well, perhaps not as quickly as it would in Max, but it's getting there. By the end of the week it should be ready to animate with. Now it's just a matter of deciding which bit of dialogue I want to animate to...

Austrian Death Machine - Double Ahnuld

Austrian Death Machine - Intro to the Intro

Conan the Barbarian - The Musical

Predator - The Musical

I love the idea of animating one of the musicals but that's a pretty massive project, even just the Austrian Death Machine dialogues are kinda lengthy. Got time to think about it while I rig the face.