If I am not, I’m sorry.
I have two questions:
A) When using relative vertex keys, does the texture space change? ie. When I want to lip sync a character, with a lot of texture on his/her face (that I worked hard to apply), will RVK’s screw that up, or will they distort like an armature?
B) How to I prevent an armature from bending backwards when it is IKA solving?
Help is much appreciated.
Thanks. 
You can add a dummy armature or an empty and apply a “Track To” constraint to the problematic intermediate bone. There’s probably better solutions, but I hope this helps.
A) When using relative vertex keys, does the texture space change? ie. When I want to lip sync a character, with a lot of texture on his/her face (that I worked hard to apply), will RVK’s screw that up, or will they distort like an armature?
The mesh data when the first key is inserted will be used to ma the texture coordinates.
Martin
B) How to I prevent an armature from bending backwards when it is IKA solving?
If you mean like in arms or legs (elbows/knees);
add another IK target in the plane and direction of the bend like so:
. <
ik target knee
and constraint the lower leg, or arm to it.
you can make the ik target the child of the one for the end of the chain. and you can still move it manually for those extreme situations.
that’s how I do it, anyway. I’m sure its not the only way (or even the best)
Thanks. Your help was really… helpful. One more question: Would you recommend RVK’s as the best method of speech animation? Or armatures (if that works…)?
Thanks again.
some motions that are on a radius are more suitable for bones, i.e. eyelid and jaw motion. Others can be done with the more linear interpolation afforded by RVKs, such as lipsync phoneme poses, expressions of emotions and the like.
In reality you could use bones for all the muscle groups of the face (I wanna try this), or RVKs, in which case you would have to have enough inbetween frames for the radial motion.
I saw a post about RVK poser script working in 2.25, so that would be a useful method/tool.
I actually am a crappy animator tho’, so don’t take my word for anything.
I use RVKs for facial animation.
One problem I have with armatures is how to “mix” expressions?
For example, mix the expression for “ooooo” with a raised eyebrow.
I think Publisher 2.25 has NLA (Non Linear Animation) which would solve that problem.
Mixing expressions is very easy using RVKs.
brian
One problem I have with armatures is how to “mix” expressions?
For example, mix the expression for “ooooo” with a raised eyebrow.I think Publisher 2.25 has NLA (Non Linear Animation) which would solve that problem.
yup, I was assuming ( shows me) publisher2.25. Mixing armature poses with 2.23 would be a bit of a challenge.
In that case my advise would be the mix: bones for eyelids, eyes and jaw ‘gross’ movement, RVKs for all other facial animation.
hopefully NaN will come back and make 2.25 available again. The character animation tools are really good.