We learned how to use Blendshapes and the animation editor to create different mouth shapes and expressions. We also learned how to constrain other parts of our model to different joints and manipulators. Additionally, we learned of Driven Keys, which are used to drive blendshapes from the movement of a joint. An issue I was repeatedly having using the Driven Keys was Maya crashing repeatedly due to invalid saves (which wasn’t the case), and also blendshapes resetting whenever I would attempt to edit the shape. Disabling cached playback resolved the issue some of the time, but not always.
In this project we were tasked with retopologizing a human head using Maya’s Quad Draw and Live Mesh toolkit. Despite having done this a few times before (mainly in 3dCoat) it was still somewhat of a struggle to get a mesh prepared not only for texturing, but for animation as well. After 3 attempts this is the version I’m most happy with as the others became too dense and unmanageable.