SHAPES Fundamentals

This page covers the fundamentals of braverabbit’s SHAPES v2. Although we’re demoing on a simple face the same principles are those used on meshes pushing 200k polygons on todays feature films. Don’t underestimate the simplicity of the concepts here.

This page was designed to establish students in the core principles behind SHAPES and avoid potential problems. SHAPES currently doesn’t support full undo and combined with how easy it is to sculpt blends while forgetting to be in Sculpt mode this all makes SHAPES susceptible to potential issues. It’s particularly important for students and professionals alike to be able to deal with these problems if and when they may arise.

The longer you use SHAPES the less you’ll tend to break it. When used as designed SHAPES is a particularly brilliant and I’d say irreplaceable part of rigging and animation in todays pipelines whether student or pro.

Topics covered

– How SHAPES works
– UI preferences
– Paint Weights
– Manual Importing of Blendshapes
– Symmetry Setup and Solutions
– The Base Menu (duplicate, mirror, split, combine)

Other classes we’ll cover SHAPES in more detail. Specifically for facial setup and body corrective workflows. Finally a last class we’ll cover the more advanced features like switching topology and advanced corrective workflows and baking from muscles and cloth.