Dragon Bait and Animate

So my biggest issue from the last few days was that I was animating on the wrong file. This file had the wrong eye mesh that when imported into Unity looked completely wrong - and a little unsettling. I managed to see Sang Yu at university yesterday and he and I went through a whole heap of things that could fix it until at last he set up locators for the eyes and imported the correct eye geometry before parenting it to the locators which were in turn parented to the joints for the eyes. Although this in itself was a hassle because I had used Advanced Skeleton 5 which is great and quick for rigging but when there's an issue doesn't make it easy to find individual joints in the face rig. The animation I was working on is my final scene and by far my favourite shot so I wanted to spend some time on it before the deadline gets too close. Before I had completely finished the animation I did some tests on how animating on 2s and 4s might be and I actually really like 4s but ...

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...