Brilliant stuff. Here’s what I’m trying to figure out:
It seems like the best way to get faces that are balanced is to model half a face with mirroring on.
And the best way to get shapes that balance well once you’ve finished modelling is to also to do it mirrored. That is, making half the smile and having it mirrored makes a perfectly balanced smile.
BUT, what if you want to do asymmetrical things, like right eyebrow up, left lip down, etc? For that, you have to have a full mesh and so you need to apply your mirror modifier.
BUT, once you do that, you kill any existing keys you have.
So, the big question is, how did they do that? Were they just very, very careful and very, very good? That’s certainly a possibility–they do genius work. Or is there a way to have your cake and eat it, too? To model and create symmetrical keys with mirroring on, and then, somehow, get those keys to survive once you apply the mirror modifier so you can add asymmetrical keys?
Bonus question: Assuming you can get you symmetrical keys to survive, what’s the best way you can think of to split them into assymetrical keys? That is, making a smile into a left smile and right smile by, say, doing something with the vertex groups on one side of the face and then the other, applying the full smile to the right vertex group to only get the right smile shape. Something like that
I guess the big question underneath all of this is–if it’s not possible now, how soon wil will something like copying vertex positions from one shape to another (or one mesh/object to another) be possible? I think I remember Ton writing that that’s coming up, but I don’t know when.
their is a rvk mirror py. script written by by toloban
if you look closer at bassams (at orange) mancandy character your see he’s not perfectly symmetrical which is just fine because human expression is quite imperfect
Excellent! Thanks for the help, both of you. With the RVKmirror.py script, does creating a vertex group named “seam” make it easier to create Shapes that will flip? I noticed on a couple of test models that I got fewer “mismatch” errors on the Shapes after I made the “seam” vertex group from the vertices on the X=0 position, but maybe that was just dumb luck.
Not a matter of luck. The seam group will make the script more forgiving about the misalignment of seam vertices (sometimes precision errors make vertices really unalignable) , but it is not yet as smart as it should, so mismatch errors will still arise. Sorry, I am working on that.
If you get other errors you will really do me a favor if you can post or send me the file.
