Facial Animation Setup - Game Character Development with Maya - page 819

5. Select the geometry and go to Skin > Edit Smooth Skin > Mirror Skin Weights,
setting Mirror Across to YZ and enabling Positive to Negative as the Direction.
The weights will now be copied across, as shown in Figure 13.11c .
Work more on the shape of the lips; they should look like those in Figure 13.11d . To add
additional realism to the face make the upper lips influence her nose slightly. Keep open-
ing the mouth up ( Figure 13.11e ) to get a better idea of how the mouth looks with the new
weights. Remember, though, that you will now have to position the outer lip joints, too,
since these will control the corners of the mouth.
When you've finished this phase of weighting and adjusting, Kila's jaw and lips will be
fully controlled by the joints.
Deleting History
While manipulating the lip joints, you may notice that the inner mouth pops
through the teeth or gums. You can at this stage flip or delete any edges that do
this, but at the cost of creating history on the model.
If you are using Maya 6, you can delete the construction history without losing
the weighting information. Simply select the mesh and go to Skin > Edit Smooth
Skin > Delete Non-Skin History.
If you are using an earlier version of Maya, however, there is unfortunately no
easy fix. What you can do, once the face and rest of the body are fully rigged and
you've made the necessary mesh modifications, is duplicate the mesh—this will
delete the history on the duplicate.
Make sure the duplicate is placed inside the correct LOD group; then bind it to
the skeleton, making sure you bind it using exactly the same joint selection. If
you originally used the Bind button on the GCDM shelf, use it again here; this
will guarantee the joint selection is the same.
Select the main mesh. Then Shift+select the duplicate and go to Skin > Edit
Smooth Skin > Copy Skin Weights. All the weighting information will now be
copied across to the duplicate character model; you can delete the original mesh,
leaving a clean character.
Nowwewillcompletethemouthbyaddingcontroltohertongue.Again,it'squitedifficult
togettothetongueinordertoweightitproperly,sofirstopenKila'smouthsometoexpose
the tongue more. We will now isolate it so that we can work on it more easily.
1. Right-click on the Kila model and select Face, switching to face editing mode.