Thanks for the comments. This is my third head, first one with splines. I've never gotten to the actual lipsync or animation part, so this should be fun! I like the tools A:M has for animation.
There are three bones so far: neck, head and lower jaw. The CP's of the mouth area are weighted. I'll be adding rigging for the eyes and probably tongue. Other than that, all movements are poses.
I tried the porcelain material and get a few black areas, even though all normals point in the same direction. It's probably the result of 5-point patches from what I've been able to gather from other posts. Once it's got bump maps and texture the small ridges shouldn't be visible anymore.
I have a few questions:
1. There's light shine-through into the mouth/head. Am I missing a setting that prevents this, or do I need to add a "negative" light inside the head?
2. When rendering, if I right-click and do a selective area render it works fine. If I hit the "render to file" and try to save a targa file it renders a totally black frame. This must be simple, but I'm stumped.
3. There are eye decals for the irises that seem to come and go at will. I end up having to redirect A:M to the file again. The decal image is in a different directory from the prj and mdl files. Would it help to keep them all in the same directory?
4. I remember reading a post about aligning all the cp's in a spline to exactly the x=0 value, and now can't find it again. Does anyone happen to have that post bookmarked?
Thanks a lot for the help,
Mark Strohbehn