The right way to create VTA facial animations

[cskiller86]

Hey guys.

I'm trying to add facial animations to a character that I've created using 3DS Max.

I'm following the "Create Flex VTA files with 3DS Max" tutorial on VDC (Valve Developer Community), but it's kind of confusing.
In the beginning, it says "[I]To create a shapekey, you need to clone the mesh of your model that makes up the face[/I]".
So I detached the character's head, copied it 34 times and created a different pose for each (e.g. eyelids down, mouth opened, lips puckered etc).

However, in the "Exporting the VTA" section of the same tutorial, it instructs to select the original mesh and the bones and then Export Selected to VTA.
So I imported the fully rigged mesh with the skeleton and all and tried to apply Morpher unto it. But I can't add targets to the Morph because the meshes aren't the same.
This is what I have:
[QUOTE][URL=http://imageshack.us/photo/my-images/809/3dsmaxmorph.jpg/][IMG]http://img809.imageshack.us/img809/9730/3dsmaxmorph.jpg[/IMG][/URL][/QUOTE]

So can I apply Morpher only on the detached head, add all the targets and export the VTA ?
Or do I actually need the full mesh ? (that would mean that I'd have to copy the body 34 times, attach each copy to its corresponding head and then add each resulting mesh as a Morph target)

Thanks.

[Deunan]

You can apply the morpher to just the detached head. as long as the detached head is in the original position.

[cskiller86]

Thanks for the reply, but it doesn't seem to work that way.
When I detach the head, each vertex is assigned a new number (because the body is removed and the whole model has a lot less vertices/polygons). For example, the vertex of the center of the left eye is 1360 in the full model and is 62 in the model of the detached head. This means that the vertices for the head of the full model (that will be used in-game) will be different to those used in the VTA file.
Because of that, if I now detach the head from the full body and then I apply Morpher to that head, when I set a morph target to 100% all the vertices will go in weird directions and the mesh will get distorted.

So, I guess that tutorial isn't very accurate and it screwed me badly and now I have to do it all over again. Unless you have any ideas as to how I'm supposed to go from here...

[MkTbKz]

Just clone a new reference mesh, apply the morpher target to it, and load shape keys that way. Then export that new reference mesh with bones to the VTA.