Hello All,
I have a little problem with a character I'm setting up. I have all the blend shapes made up for her facial expressions. I have three different catagories of shapes: eyes (brows and lids), mouth and jaw (due to her design, this character won't have the usual bones to work the jaw). All of these are controlling different parts of the same surface -- the head/face. The total blend shapes is nearly 60. I need them all to work together, so they have to all be in the same blend shape node, created at the Front of Chain (so they can properly work with the rest of the already skinned rig). In other words, I need to have her be able to smile, close an eye and open her jaw all at once. She can do that now.
However, as you can imagine there's just too many controls to efficiently animate this character if they're all grouped up together in the channel box. So what I set out to do is have three empty nodes (one each for the eyes, mouth and jaw) each with the adaquate amount of added attributes to reflect the amount of shapes it has. Then in the connection editor, I was going to sync each piece up. This way, by selecting the correct node, just the blend shapes for that particular part of the face (eg: the mouth) would show up in the channel box. So if I'm animating a mouth expression, all I see are the mouth expressions, and likewise for the eyes and jaw!
Crap! I hope I'm not making this too complicated!
So I tried to do all that, which I thought would simply work, but when I hit a number 1 in the channel box (smile_left, for example) an error comes up saying:
// Error: The attribute 'mouthshapes.smile_left' is locked or connected and cannot be modified. //
Holy crap! I just figured it out.
I had the From > To in the Connection Editor all backwards. Oh well, since I came this far, I might as well finish it! Maybe it will help some other dumbass in the future!
Thanks for all my help!