Paris Lucke 3D Artist Blog: A Time Apart: Fred Corrective Blendshapes Upper and Lower Body DONE

I have finally fixed the corrective blendshapes to the best of my ability, this has taken me a lot longer than it should have as before my previous upload I had some minor problems nothing too bad - or so I thought because what doesn't seem too bad at this stage will be even worse when it comes to animating. Each time I did it I would get problems which meant I have probably done this about 7 or 8 times at least and the legs about 3 times...

With the upper body towards the start, most of my problems were to do with the coat and I was modelling the blendshapes like I would regular modelling which meant I was using tools like average vertices which built up history which you can't have with blendshapes which caused the bulge in the last post and in some parts I had overused the sculpt geometry tool. At times I was editing under the wrong parts and got myself in a muddle, sometimes I didn't have edit turned on at all in the pose editor. More upper body problems included the collar tugging, parts of the coat tugging, arm warping out of its original shape, the shoulder twist caused problems when I used the sculpt geometry tool. When I moved the arm I would get a stray vertex despite it having a weight - I had to fix this in the component editor by weighting everything to 1 and sharing out the weights again there. For now I have decided to leave the bottom of the coat without a blendshape because the coat I have to move drastically to make it sit on top of the shorts which caused some more warping, so instead I will have a rig set up to control the bottom of the coat and see how that goes. Weights in the pose editor wouldn't always add up to 1 either...

The legs I had problems with getting the skinning to mirror properly - the initial skinning mirrored fine (once I realised I was using copy instead of mirror which I was doing because for some reason I thought mirror options were for connected meshes only) and the blendshapes didn't mirror on the knee correctly so I resculpted the knee. Because the coat is asymmetrical I had to repeat the process on the right the same as I did the left which took me even longer, only the hips and elbows successfully mirrored.

Another problem I encountered at uni was I couldn't get the pose editor to work properly, I couldn't delete poses and joints would jump out the mesh - it seemed to be Maya wasn't installed on that particular PC properly - just my luck.

I forgot to screenshot all the problems I had (mainly because I was getting very frustrated and my thinking went with my patience) but here's a couple below.