Character Animation - Blend Shapes

This image shows how I have worked belnd shapes into my character for facial animation. As I am not lip syncing this character I havent got to worry about every single visome or phoneme for the sounds but I have done some basic eyebrow movements and happy and sad and excited looks so I can work some good expressions into the animations and show some good emotion.

To do this I have basically made duplicates of the head model and then altered the duplicates to different shapes. Maya then creates blend shapes between the base and the duplicate to give me a slider which can be altered at different levels to change the degree of animation. Also I can mix individual movements together to create new ones.