Vegan

3D artZ : I tried your suggestion, but the nulls still don't do anything. Did you mean create a pose and then manually set all of the constraints over again ? Thanks

David, I thought you might be interested to know that I have had some success in getting your rig to work in another model. This is not the horribly high patch model I have been working with - just a test model this time. I used the 'Arnie' model from the V.9 CD ( it has no bones or muscle poses to worry about ) Before as a test, I had used the Tarzan model. With the Tarzan,I deleted the bones as well as any actions / ( relationships ), but some were left over, which led me to believe that I was really just using the sliders from the Tarzans' original set up. I began to think you were right about the rig not being transferable to another model. This time as a test - and to make sure I used a model without prebuilt poses sliders, - I used the Arnie model. I opened the Arnie model, imported your 'tutehead V2 model on top of it > lined the two up so they had similar proportions > moved the V2 geometry over, but did not delete it ( This had caused crashing in previous tests ) > hid all bones but the mouth geometry bones , the cheek,nostril, ear, jowl,and other "control' bones > assigned CPs to them ....done ! Even without fixing the CP weighting I was able to see the setup working correctly all within ten minutes . The best part about this was all of those pre-made sliders that you already have setup ! Of course you are still required to refine the look of the expressions, but so much of the work has already been done . The only snag that I ran into is that the pose sliders seem to loose their negative values ( in a frown/smile slider you loose the frown pose info ) Any idea what causes this ? I hope I'm not 'jumping the gun' on this. It appears to be totally possible to use this rig in another model. Thanks once again for you efforts !

Thanks a million David !

I noticed that when I create a new action, my face model snaps to certain extreme positions. When I turn the constraints to 'OFF' on some of them, the face goes back to normal. Here are the ones giving me problems : " Nose targeting" pulls the nostrils upwards. "Lips I/O" pulls her lips out ( like a ducks bill ) " Lips tageting" pulls her lips downward Also the cheek constraints pull her cheeks in too far. If I understand you correctly from the above post , this is supposed to happen and you are to model these as your extreme poses ? ( When you create a new pose / action, the face is supposed to snap to the mouth open position ? ) Thanks !

Itsjustme : I have been following your posts over at CGTalk. I have my face fully rigged, but the constraints need to be worked out, as well as many other bone arc problems. So much work to be done ! You must be really quick with typing. There must be hundreds of bones here. While others are on the subject of CP weighting, I was curious if there is a way to use a map to specify the CP weighting VS. picking at all of those CPs manually ( That would make sense ) Just out of laziness,I selected a few CPs around the nostril area on my model and gave them shared weight with my jaw bone. Without any fancy rigging, the Cps were moving just like the rig does .... hmm ..so ... what are the drawbacks to using Cp weights vs. bones ? Also a question about the 'scale to reach' option on bones : I notice that when a bone scales, it scales on all axis. I see the ' limit scale to Z axis' option . How did you limit the bones scaling on other axis ? Thanks a million !