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[FWL]

Hello everybody,

I was wondering what the best workflow/technique is for making morph targets on a character, because I have some difficulty with them.
I've modeled a character and have made morphs for the eyelids and mouthshapes. To make these morphs I made a mesh for the eyeballs and for the teeth within the object of the head to see/check that the morph shapes are correct and don't cross the eye for example. But then I want to copy the meshes of the eyes and the teeth to seperate object so I can attach them to a bone in the figure editor. The problem I haven then is that I manually have to align the eye and teeth object again and move them to there original position so that the morphing still works as designed. This becomes quite fiddly to get right again. Is there a more acurate/easier way to position these eye/teeth objects to there original position in the figure editor?

[Steve]

Yes, I see the problem. When you attach the different meshes (teeth, mouth, eyes, body, etc.) to different bones they are added in the local coordinate system of each bone, and so aren't aligned as they were in a single object.

I'll see if I can come up with some way to do this.

[johnar]

FWL

 Is it necessary to add the eyes and teeth to seperate bones in the fig editor?.
 
 In most cases you might find that if you just add the whole object/character, complete with eyes and teeth already within the main object, then attach the whole character to figure as per normal.

This might work for you. (it does work). and You only need one eyeball.

  Make an eyeball that fits your characters face/eye sockets.
 Then, Cut eyeball from that object, go 'object -> new' and paste, so that now the eyeball is a seperate object

 Center the eyeball. ie 'edit->Locate-> Center about origin'

 Then make morph targets Look Left, Look right, Look up and Look down.

 Once that is done, copy the eyeball back to your character and position into one eye socket.
 Then go back to eyeball object, copy again and paste back into your character and position into the other eyesocket.

Add character to figure in figure mode as per normal.
 When you add your figure to scene  mode you should see your Look Left, look right etc.. morph targets in the left of the time track. Set a key for each morph. (select morph -> press 'k'
 Open graph editor to adjust morph strength by selecting key in graph editor and dragging up and down. Both eyes will move in unison.

 Using that method does away with needing to add eyes to bones.

[FWL]

Hello Steve and Johnar,

Thanks for the response! Johnar, your method indeed works for morphes on the eyes. But in my situation it involves morphs of the eyelids not the eyeballs themselves. These are very dependent on the exact location of the eyeball to stay acurate. I can indeed put all the 'objects' in one mesh. Then seperate them out via the layer system in the object editor. The asigned layer for a mesh in the object editor translate through in the figure editor. So you can isolate parts within the figure editor by switching of layers in the object editor. This way the original position of the individual meshes is kept and you still can split the mesh into different parts. However to asign a part of the mesh to a bone you'll now have to use bone influence or weightpainting. Hiding layers in the object editor doesn't prevent them for being painted on in the figure editor. So when want to asign the eyeball to the bone its very easy to also paint the eyelid or the eyesocket as well with leads to unwanted deformation.
So Steve maybe a solution would be to have an option to only paint the visible layer as set in the object editor? This way you could paint a part in isolation in the figure editor? Or have the seperate meshes that make up the object still be selectable in the figure editor and have the option to paint in isolation or asign mesh to bone in the figure editor?

[FWL]

Hi Steve and Johnar,

I think I found a way to achieve what I wanted. I made the object with the eyes and teeth in one mesh. Then I copy pasted the eyes to separate objects. In the figure editor I attached all the objects to the same first bone. This way their relative position within the figure is based on the same bone. Then I assigned the specific objects (for example the eyes) to their specific bone within the skeleton by weight painting. Because they are separate objects now, you can paint them in isolation. The only tricky part is to center the bone for the eye so it rotates on its axes and doesn't wobble. But in mesh-mode this can be eyeballed (no pun intended) pretty easy.

Thanks again!