the hair experience and blendshapes

Blendshapes

First I'll start with the blendshapes. This was quite the experience. I only made a few blendshapes when creating my last model since I didn't use it to animate much, but only 15 seconds or so of my storyboard, so only a few expressions were necessary like blinking, simple eyebrow movement, nose wrinkling and moving the lips either a bit up or down. 

This time was on another scale that's on a whole other level! To make it easier for myself I started with the simple blendshapes first: Eyelids and eyebrows movements. I created blinks for the upper lids and slight movement for the lower lids like squinting. For the eyebrows I made six blendshapes for each eyebrow, an upwards and downwards direction for three locations on each eyebrow; inner, middle and outer. The I moved on to making the nose wrinkle and the cheeks puff out and suck in. (You'll never know when this will be useful!) I then decided to make the easier blendshapes for the mouth first: some expressions! A smile, frown, pout movement for each side, and a full upwards and downwards motion of the lips (You never know). Then came the difficult part for me: Phonemes and more lip movement. I wanted to create a similar facial control panel like with Mery, but since I don't know how they put it together, I used my own interpretation. I tried to make a few upwards and downwards motions for the upper and lower lips, as well as some sidewards directions. I hope I can make the mouth take certain shapes to make the phonemes look different each time (so it won't be like copy and paste the phoneme) After I was done with that I made a blendshape for each phoneme to (hopefully) make the animating process of the lipsync a bit easier.

The first blendshapes: eyelid and brow movement 

My army!

Animation panel of the facial expressions 

Turn that frown upside down!

I then added the blendshapes to the original mesh. And I was thinking I was being so smart by adding them grouped to the different parts of the face: eyes, eyebrows, lips, phonemes. Oh boy was I wrong. Sure, the blendshapes were working fine, but then I found out (AFTER HAVING SET ALL THE DRIVEN KEYS TO THE CONTROLS) that the groups override each other, so that was a thing. I then had to delete all the blendshapes and bind them with the mesh again, this time all at the same time, and then I had to set the keys again. I was a bit lucky though since I had put restrictions on the control, so I didn't have to be too precise, but just whacking the controls up and down and set the keys.

But that hair though

(hair though, hairdo, gettit? Sounds nearly the same! ahhh terrible joke is terrible.)

I asked Mat for some assistance and explanation on the hair. At first we wanted to look at nHair, but for some reason it wasn't working. The clumps kept being located funny and the scalp wasn't filled with hair. Again and again. After a few curses here and there we decided to give up and try xGen hair instead. Since Mat doesn't have too much experience with this yet, I tried to figure it out myself by looking at a few different tutorials uploaded on digital tutors and the official Maya youtube channel.

I got an idea on how to make it work and so I decided to try something out.

At least I got hair now! I settled with this but I still wasn't too satisfied with it. The hair didn't seem to respond too well to the curves used for xGen and I couldn't get rid of some weird bald spots for it still cut through the mesh. A LOT. You could even see strands of hair coming far down the mesh in the mouth when I would open it. Not too charming. I then made an extra copy for backup and deleted all the xGen files and tried to give nHair another shot.

This time I looked for a short autodesk tutorial on their helpdesk website (to where you get directed when pressing F1). I saw they used a woman with long hair as an example and showed how I could achieve a bit of a hairstyle, so I decided to try that. I selected the scalp, added lots and lots of clumps of hair, deleting them each time until I thought I had the right amount. Since my laptop isn't the greatest when it has too think a lot, it took quite some time before the hair found a good resting position. I then could select the curves, make it able to select the vertices of the curves and cut a few of them away to create some kind of fringe. I then tried to add a bit of a curl to the bottom of the hairs (Which gravity in Maya will probably pull down, but at least the shape will stick a bit!)

Hair!

Since I couldn't add high resolution uvmaps to the mesh without Maya fucking up and all, I couldn't paint them own (looks stupid as well though.) So I tried to make them using curves. Even though my French is terrible, I was able to follow some French guy's tutorial on how to create them using curves. I created a set of curves, duplicated them to double it up, and then duplicated them to the other side of the face as well. Add some hair to them and voila: something that somewhat resembles eyebrows!

I asked Mat for help on how to make em stick to the face. Since curves can't constraint with polygons, I had to create a lattice. This is kind of a box in which the selected objects reside and when you change the lattice, you'll deform said objects. The thing with the lattice is: I can constraint them to the head joint now! They weren't changing with the mesh now though. For this I selected corners of the segments of the lattice and created three clusters (one for each part of the eyebrow that moves). These clusters I then moved up and down (and some rotation as well) and used driven keys to make them move with the mesh when the controls move. So that sort of worked quite well. Thanks Mat! 

While animating I stumbled upon some tiny problems and irritations.

When I put the scene together and wanted to move the arms, the controls on the arm would all act up. I thought this problem resided with the connections to the clavicle so I cried out to Mat (again in the weekend, sorry Mat) for help. He then helped me out (bless) and giving me a piece of solid advice: KISS. Keep It Simple Stupid. Probably, because I followed a few different rigging tutorials at the same time, I ended up with a very complex rig and set of controls, so some errors occurred. Mat played around a bit, breaking some connections here and there and constraining some parts again and it worked! I was still a bit hesitant and scared the first time I started animating again (first time? probably tenth time) but it worked! Hallelujah!

For some reason something went wrong with the UVs that belong to the shoes. While the main mesh of the body is okay (luckily?) the UVs of the shoes seem to move all over the place on the texture editor along with the UVs in the scene. What made the problem worse is that I wasn't able to tackle the problem. I couldn't change the order of the inputs to make the UVs not all act up when moving the feet around, so instead Mat advised to change them to a solid colour instead and try to tackle this problem next time round when creating a model.

Another thing that scared me was that when I'm animating, I turn off the hair and the eyebrows, for it's annoying and they're in the way. Then when I turned them on again, they wouldn't follow the head. I WAS SO SCARED, YOU WOULDN'T EVEN BELIEVE ME. After a few days I realised they don't follow since the nucleus can't think for there's no logical movement going on, so I think this won't be a problem when I'm finished blocking and I spline all the movements.