Maya

rigging-character

Animate Blendshapes Weights per Vertex

its described in the manual of maya.

well lets say its not the most unintuitive thing ever.

but it doesnt show how to make them change in an animation.

Not directly no, in tutorial do this do that fashion*. Theres a general discussion on how to key ANY of theese multi attributes, so their demontsrtion is not about blendshape weights but a comparable weight attribute. And they tell you that up front. So its assumed that by the time you know how to paint the weights you know how to key them. On a related note they also discuss how to use the cache to accmplish the same thing. (cache is better if you intend to paint frame by frame)

so the simples brute force way of

setKeyframe blendShapeName.inputTarget[X].inputTargetGroup[X]

isnt really rocket science now is it.

So its a 1 - 1 mapping, yes you can use same for cluster weights, vertex colors, hell you can even key per particle atrributes etc. But kudos for you you can spot things that ought to be self explanatory to most users but do not get it anyway. So Im saying your perceptive but not more so than the avarage user SHOULD be.

But yes no go and do anything you wish with the nodes you deciperewd the first key.

There used to be no sane way to do this but that was a looong time ago.

BESIDES: any attribute in maya that is manipulatable by a user can be animated via a expression node even if its not possible otherwise.

• the manual would be about 1000,000,000,000,000 pages long if it did that to ALL features.

thought I made some discovery.

You did for yourself. Still some things to learn tough from your maya blogposts. You do a lot of extra work many of your examples.

For example he octopuss rig can be done differently with path anim and a curve on surface, the great thing is that you get a coordinate system where along is normalized same as any of the other 2 axes so you can easily grow anlomng the curve while still having rotation control. Making secondary animation such as undulation easier to mak as you can easily do them now in subspace predictably without worrying aboute, and you odnt have to worry about bones so if you add mure stuff later no need to rebind. As a bonus or bane depending on what you do the length is now fixed.

example:

growmockup.mov20 (really old stuff from 2005, 813K havent really had time to put new stuff up, so you have probably seen it. As a brainteaser the scene is avalable if you decide to dig a bit on the site creatively, real ugly implementation too )

PS: if you want to do something thats not described in the manual then animate the selection of some history item in animation. Now that requires some brauin teaser but its possible, see the wishlist exaqmple where i show that maya does have a history stack just as max does, that can be likewise editted and turned back.