Creating BlendShapes in Maya 2020

hey guys um here i am in maya 2020 and i was just playing around and i opened up one of my older characters so this is a character i made uh a long time ago probably five years or more and he's just a crazy little uh alien slug and um you can see all the joints are in place and uh the rigging is pretty simple but it's just kind of a fun uh crazy little animation now one thing that um i would like to add is maybe it would be also cool if the character was blinking so you know there's a couple different ways to do it we can add a joint on top and the bottom and create the blinking animation with joints or i thought it would be really cool to make like a mini tutorial on how would that be done using blend shapes so to do it with blend shapes it's actually really simple all i'm going to do is go to windows then go to animation editors and go to shape editor and this little window comes up and right now there's no blend shapes on this character right so this is a low poly game character and what i would like to do is add a blend shape which then could be controlled inside a game engine so like in unity 3d for example if we create a blend shape of him blinking then there'll be a slider in unity 3d that a developer can slide and make the character blink at will at any you know at any point they want so let's go ahead and create a blend shape and i'm going to call this one i because he only has one eye and then i'm going to say add target okay and i'm going to call this blink so obviously we can create as many targets as we want but i just want to do something really simple and oops i didn't mean to do that and so it's going to be called blink so you could see that it's still uh it's set to the edit mode and the key is not set the key is going to be set um these this button you know this little thing here refers to the key on the timeline so if you want something open or closed this is for animation so we can do that in a minute but for now uh let's just simply create the the blend shape for him um blinking right so what i'm gonna do is i'm gonna make sure this is selected and i'm gonna go to sculpting and i'm gonna head over to this uh fourth one called grab tool i'm gonna click on it hold down b to kind of make it a little larger and my uh x object x is selected so i can you could see that it's symmetrical and what i could do i can just very slowly kind of begin to pull up or modify the shape to make it look like what i would think happens when he blinks so you can pull this around and then if you want to smooth it you can hold down the shift key and just kind of smooth it out and you can control the strength of your stroke right here so that's important to to understand i'm going to make this larger and just keep pulling this up and i'm going to begin to pull this down so the top lid kind of comes down and the bottom lid kind of comes up and i'm just going to move them together something like that i think is what i was looking for hold down the shift key to just make sure that this is sort of uh has nice topology so you can see the topology is kind of running along the edges there it doesn't look too too distorted right because we don't want to distort the actual texture of the character when he's textured so keep that in mind and now to kind of seal the deal we can keep using this grab tool or we can jump over here and use the bulge tool so i'm going to click on bulge and my strength is at 1.2 let's see what that means and just kind of i like it uh kind of weak and so this way i can drag it around and do it very gradually that's just my own preference so something like that i think is what i was looking for as far as like what happens when he closes his eyes again remember you can hold down the shift to smooth it out but i think this looks pretty good and now let's test and see what that actually looks like so if we drag this little slider we can see that our eye closes and and we can even close it and let's see i'm looking at this spot here it's kind of weird so i'm going to smooth it out so even if we close the eye right we can actually play the animation and see what happens with when the eye is kind of closed which is kind of crazy looking but if the character is kind of idle then you can control the eye much better right so maybe you don't want to actually have him blink when he is jumping but i just wanted to show you that and if you actually are finished making your blend shape you can just click on this button and that means you are done editing and now if we wanted to we can go to frame one or zero and press s or press key i mean press key here and set this to like zero right and then let's go to like well just for the sake of this exercise i'm just gonna go to like three and drag this up and you can see the key has been set so now there's a key on zero being open and then close and then maybe it opens again on five so he kind of does blink and then he does his chewing and then resets so that's all uh there is to it and then if you just simply export him out by um selecting your mesh and the joints then you can export him out into a game engine and in the game engine uh you will see the same exact slider and there you can control the blinking which is really cool and very simple and at any point if you wanted to modify uh the blinking keyframes you could see there's a little trick you could see that the keyframes are actually not showing up here when you click on the joins you can see the keyframes are right there on the timeline the red lines right these are my keys but if i click on the actual mesh and try to look for the blend shapes there are no keyframes for the blend shape so to actually see those uh all you have to do is go to uh channel box and click on in the inputs uh click on your eye and then you'll see oh there they are so here you can actually right click and for example you know delete it so that's how easy it is and if you want to hold down the shift key and click on one of the keys you can actually move them around so i just wanted to show you that little uh trick and hopefully that was simple enough so now you can add cool blend shapes to your characters something like blinking or maybe talking moving mouth tongue lips all that stuff could be done with blend shapes alright so subscribe and we'll see you next video thanks

Channel: Alan Balodi

Views: 6,909

Keywords: blend shapes, morph, Maya, 3d, tutorials, tips, 3d tutorial, how to 3d, creating blinking

Id: 8tbFH4D66Sc

Length: 8min 20sec (500 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 04 2020