So I’ve heard so much about Maya’s Blendshapes animation deformer, but never actually tried it out before. Tonight I made a model in Zbrush, saved 3 facial “states” (static, pleased and amazed) and exported them as .obj’s, which I opened in Maya and put together using blend shapes. Not only can you seamlessly morph a chunk of polygons from one state to another, but you can even combine states! Here’s the result.

The “static” facial state, also the original model that the others derived from.

The “pleased” facial state (smile’s a little quirky, I know)

!!! Amazed !!!

And to my great surprise, you can COMBINE facial states– as you can see, the mouth is partially open (attributed to ‘amazed’), but smiling (‘pleased’), and the eyes almost look like they’re laughing, yet the brows imply that they didn’t quite get the joke. hehehe. This is FUN!