MAYA: use vertex colors as blendshape weights?

arshlevon

wondering if anyone knew how to use vert colors as weight maps? i know you can use a texture, but i was hoping to use the vertex paint tools tools to blend mulitple blendshapes together in realtime.

Illusions

I've never done it, but I think its already built into blendshapes, and you use its stored vertex colors:

Animation Menu: Edit Deformers > Paint Blend Shape Weights Tool □

Theres a "Key Selected Target Weights" box when you pull that up, and you can also paint the weights in there using Maya's vertex paint tools.

arshlevon

hmm. basically what i am doing is writing realtime shaders that use vertex colors to blend different normal maps, but i wanted to also associate blend shapes with the different normal maps. this way i can interactively blend several different forms, to make many variations.

Mark Dygert

Jason Osipa kind of covers doing this in his book Stop Starring Chapter 9 and 12. He builds a control board that uses expressions to drive blend shapes and wrinkle maps at the same time. But he plugs each bump into the previous one and dials in each bump 0 - 1.0 as he needs them. So you might have to do some hypershade trickery to get the vertex color masks working. Either way you're probably going to be writing a bunch of expressions, which he covers pretty well, but I'm sure there are other resources that cover that subject better?

I adapted it to 3dsmax after reading his book. I use reaction manager (Driven Keys), the expression manger, blend materials, a control board, and 3-4 wrinkle diffuse/bump maps. It was actually easier to set up in 3ds then it was in Maya... but then I use Max more...

Anyway, good luck!