Argh

I've just worked on a blendshape for 20 minutes or so when maya crashed. I keep saving but it's the 2nd time I've lost a blendshape I was quite pleased with. Also, I have been going through and rigging the face, and then as part of the rig I went to bind the skin. I realized that I've not separated the body mesh from the facial mesh before duplicating the face to create blendhapes.

What this mean is that if I add a blendshape that includes the whole body and a modified face, the blendshape will also work for the rest of the body and put it back to it's default T-pose position.

What I tried doing is cutting the face, of both the original mesh and the blendshape and then re-attaching the face. this does not work. The head just goes crazy.

My next step was to cut the head of the original mesh, duplicate it, and then take the blendshape head, transfer vertex position into the copy, and then use the copy as a blendshape. This does work, but then reattaching the original face to an already bound skin doesn't work.

I'm going to try again once I finish all the blendshapes. This time I'm going to try saving skin weight, detaching the skin from the skeleton, doing the same process with the blendshape copy, reattach the skin and reload the weight. I just need to figure out how to save/transfer body weight. Not quite sure yet.