Back to work - Modeling Technicalities

After a brief break for the holidays, I'm back to work, aiming to stay on top of my production schedule by completing modeling and texturing before the semester begins. My preliminary issues are how to model and texture Justin when the Geo is already skinned. Lauren discovered a great texturing trick during her thesis where you can layout UVs on a duplicated version of a piece of Geo and transfer to the original as long as they are exactly the same in terms of number of vertices. Within the Modeling Menus, under Polygons --> Transfer there is an option to transfer UVs. So I can use all of the blend shape Geo I will be building to lay out the UVs of the skinned Geo. As for modeling, the biggest issue is making sure not to ruin the facial blend shapes. With the kid I modeled for character 2 moving the eyes ruined the main Lid controls. I had moved the joint itself, which Leif had seemed squeamish about. So this time I unlocked the translate of the eye control and moved the eye control--something I had tried originally with the kid, but didn't seem to work. I'm realizing the reason this doesn't work is for eye rotation because the center of rotation is where the joint is, not the control...so when I move the eye aim or rotate the head the eyes pop out of the head---I guess I will have to move the joints themselves.

The issue with moving the joints is that there are 4 joints for each eye, making it kind of complicated to determine which to move. There is an EyeArea joint that has the innermost eyelids bound to it so that for extreme movement, the eyes can pop out of the head and still be attached to the skin. Because of this skinning, I can't move any parent joint of the EyeArea joint or the Geo will be affected. So the only joint I can move is the jntRig_Rt_Eye (& JntRig_Lf_Eye). This is the joint I ended up moving in the kid last semester which for some reason ruined the basic eyelid controls. After moving the joint now the eyelid controls still work, so I'll have to check periodically and make sure moving this joint isn't the problem.