Sorry if this had been asked here before...
Would it be possible to allow users to enable an extra animation track for mesh deformation?
for example.. if I had a meshed face, I could have a track for eyelids blinking and then a separate, independent track for mouth and lip movements, all on the same mesh.. (or even a 2nd mesh, if that was the way to go about it).
currently I use bones to animate facial expressions and mouth/eye lids (like any good animator should!).
but my work involves many simple character portraits, and the slow part for me is always the face rig. sometimes I can save a lot of time by just manually deforming the mesh for blinking or mouth movements. but usually the mesh deform track is reserved for perspective tricks on the mesh.
On an almost related note... what would be amazing for my workflow would be to allow a 2nd deforming set of weights on a single mesh.. sometimes I rig my character with bones to cheat perspective... does works very well.. however if I'm using this technique on a rigged face.. then I have to use a bunch of transform constraints on the bones for eyebrows, eyes, eyelids, lips, etc. to make sure they also move with the bone I use to push the perspective. it works great but setting up the rig is a very tedious process, especially with the constraints are currently not kept when I duplicate a bone or rig.
It's probably not trivial, I can guess.. just thought I'd throw the idea out there anyway.
thanks for your time.