Pipeline 1: Jetpack Jones - Rigging the Eyebrows and Cleaning up.

   As with the previous facial movements, a blendshape is required for the eyebrow movement. This time, the duplicated head is created with the skullcap and the eyebrows, which was then wrap deformed onto the duplicate head.

A new joint was then placed onto the chin and the forehead, the joint on the forehead was rotated to fit along the head's geometry. After binding the skin to the new joints, the weights around the eyebrows was painted (some animation place onto the forehead joint in up and down positions) and then mirrored across to the right side. 

When painting the weights, we have to be careful so to not to warp the skin around the brows too much. A duplicate shape was then made of the eyebrows being up and down, which was then plugged in the original duplicate as a blendshape. 

With the blendshape active, we use the paint weights option under the deform menu. With only the left side of the head selected, the skin weights was flooded (up and down) and the center vertices made to be 0.5 so there is a smooth transition between the brows when moving.

New dulipcates was made in the on/off position and placed to the side. Following this the "on" option was turned on the paint weight tool and areas painted around the brow was painted as "off", creating a surprised/angry brow shape. 

With all four of these positions completed and copied for the right side, the blendshape (history) was removed from the original duplicate. Connecting all the blendshapes back into the original, the shape targets for the right side was flipped in the shaped editor so they move the correct eyebrow. 

Activating the eyebrow blendshape to the Jetpack Jones model, the duplicated eyebrows and the skull cap is also created as a blendshape so they move with the eyebrows. To finish this blendshape, a new control is placed next to the head (a star nurb) and the set driven key menu used to connect them. Limits are also placed so not to break the skinning on the model and the animation changed to linear in the graph editor.

 

To clean up the scene, we removed anything we don't need. This Involved:

- Removing the extra nurb controls

- Placing all the mouth rigging onto one layer

- Making sore the blink and brow blendshapes are on the correct layers.

- Exporting the extra heads from the blendshapes. 

- Making sure the inherit transformed is turned off on the geo_group

- Turn off the joints in the viewport.

- Making sure the whole model has a Lambert 1 material rather than the UV Material.

-Optimizing the scene. 

The next step will be doing the texturing.