Dragon Bait and Animate

Today was spent trying to work out how to make a face try black then fall off of my character as she was moving. In prior tests, this was easy as she was just a static model but with a rig in her and animation it complicates things in Unity. After a lot of trial and error my best method that I can (hopefully) repeat for other polygons is as follows: I need to duplicate the model as a whole with the input graph, then delete every face that isn't the one 'dying'. Duplicating with the input graph keeps the rig and animation intact. This polygon also has to be slightly pulled away from the mesh so that it doesn't intersect and cause strange rendering glitches. Keeping this individual face means that I can animate it on its own in Unity. I animate the alpha channel from 0 - 1. Going from transparent to opaque. This is set from 0-60 frames (2 seconds) I then need to have another duplicate of the face with no history. This polygon then has no rig, or an...

I've spent a lot of time recently trying to sort out how I'm going to get my "dead polygons" to look on my character. My original plan had been with texture but then I decided my character wouldn't have a proper UV map so that I could have a gradient effect from top to bottom of the character. So with this in mind, I couldn't build a few textures and just swap them out. So I decided that I would create a duplicate of the model, but just the faces that were "dying" and layer it on top of my model with a slight offset. This worked in early tests with a static model but I knew I would have issues once I started to animate. I didn't realise how many issues... Once I duplicated the mesh and deleted the faces that I didn't need I needed to delete any non-deformer history otherwise when I pulled it into Unity it would still be 1 whole mesh without any missing polys. This either crashed Maya (repeatedly) or it created strange, twisted and st...