Righty....2

Just got back from a sound meeting with Pip and Sarah and before i started animating, i thought it would be better to do a quick summary of the last couple of days.

Painting weights was a quicker process than i thought it would be but it took me longer to finish than i thought it would. I'm really quite pleased with how alot of it has come out, the body im particulaly pleased with because by adding extra bones to distribute the weight in his face and belly we have managed to achieve no rippling in his mesh when he moves around despite the fact that he's quite a chunky character.
If you dont know what im talking about when I say rippling have a look at my model from the second year - Bungo
You see how the belly is folding in on itself underneath his chest, when this is moving it looks REALLY bad, the character looks more like their made out of taffy than actual flesh (or in Machos case rock).

There are a couple of areas that im not entirely confident about, the arms and the legs required (as far as i could tell) minimal intervention from me after the smooth bind, so i expect that i'll start spotting problems when im animating, this shouldnt be too much of an issue though because with painting weights you can fix it on the model there and then.

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I wasted much of monday trying find a way to get multiple blendshapes setup on a 2d facial control panel. The only answer i found was in the book Stop Staring, however they used quite a lengthy process that revolved around their own mel script tools which for some reason refused to work in 2010.

After a quick whine to Sarah, she collared Edgely who was kind enough to share his prcoess using set driven keys, which worked like a dream, after that it only took me a couple of hours to get the facial control panel setup. So cheers for that Edge.

There were a couple of errors with the blendshapes not merging together as well as they should be and i've spent a couple of hours cleaning them up as best i can, but their still not perfect. However the deformations are barely noticeable and are only occuring when the blendshapes are at their most extreme (positions that probably arn't going to be used) , so for the sake of time management im going to leave them for the time being and see how we get on.
I'm going to be keeping a VERY close eye on them though and if their causing too much trouble its something that will need to be adressed, but we shall see.