Facial Animation Setup - Game Character Development with Maya - page 812

FIGURE 13.4 Merge all the seams, welding the vertices together.
To fix this, select all the vertices of her head and hair and go to Edit Polygons >
Merge Vertices, setting the value to a small number such as 0.0001. This way, only
vertices that lie on top of each other will be welded ( Figure 13.4 , right).
3. Double-check each area that this welding should have affected, including the hair-
line, eyelashes, and inner mouth. Make sure that the lips, though, have not been
merged.
4. Combining Kila into a single object will have placed the geometry out of the LOD
group, so quickly make sure she is again parented to the Kila4096 group. This will
ensure the LODs still work.
5. Delete the history on the mesh.
Note
There may be a stray node still in the Kila4096 group; this may have been
missed when we deleted her history. She is a single model now, though, so
it's safe to delete this node. Use Hypergraph or Outliner to check for this
issue.
ThefirstLODforKilaisnowasinglemesh,whichwillmakehereasiertoworkwith.Now
let's connect her to the base skeleton.
1. In the Outliner, navigate to the first joint of the base skeleton; this should be called
Root. Select it and open up the hierarchy by Shift+clicking on the plus sign (+)
next to Root.
2. Go to Edit > Select Hierarchy to select all the objects beneath Root.
3. Although the skeleton hierarchy is selected, you don't want to bind all the joints.
Scroll down the Outliner and, holding Ctrl, deselect all the joints ending with _Tip.
These are only here as visual aids and don't deform the character.
Also make sure you only have joints selected. Unselect any icons, constraint
nodes, or effectors (which are part of the IK system and usually named “effector”)
that may also be selected.
4. With just the correct joints selected, hold Shift and add the Kila mesh to the selec-
tion.
5. Go to Skin > Bind Skin > Smooth Bind and open the options. For Bind To, choose
Selected Joints, and for Bind Method, choose Closest Joint. Set Max Influences to
3, and Dropoff Rate to 4.