I am trying to create a short animation that will have quite a few characters in it. Due to the number of chars, and the subsequent polys that these will generate the rendering times will be unacceptable. I am therefore planning to produce all of my characters at two different levels of detail. (high polly count for forground and a lower polly count for when they are some distance from the camera). The trouble is that the chars in the BG still need mouth shapes for talking. (all morphs will be removed except the mouth shapes). Does anyone have any suggestions as to how I can transfer the mouth shape morphs from the standard dork to a lower polly version? I am doing the modelling in Lightwave 5.6. Using this I can easily produce the same model at different levels of detail, but due to the heads verticies being different in the lower polly model, I can not reapply the head morphs. I have tried exporting heads from Poser with mouth shapes set at 1 (one export for each mouth shape), using the level of detail tool on each of these heads and then reimporting them as morth targets, but the even using the same settings in the LOD tool on each head produces undesired results as although the polly count of the heads is consistant the verticies are moved too much. Since the chars will be in the BG the result doesn't have to be great, so long as I can get Open Mouth, Part Lips, and O shapes. I real don't fancy reproducing the morph targets for about 10 different chars by hand so any suggestions would be appreciated. I have been reading a couple of threads here recently about the Tailor prog, would this be of any help? Thanks.

If you make your low poly figure from the regular one and do not affect the scale, and leave enough head polys to do the job, The Taylor should be able to reproduce the morphs, or at least as much as the mesh allows. The Taylor cannot know that is clothing and what is not, only can know if the groups line up. The other choice is to reduce polys on everything but the head. Since the head has the most polys, this will cost you.

You can't use an animated gif as a texture, I'm afraid.

Positive... I tried. Oh how I tried ! :) The animate feature in pro pack just allows yout to change the texture map at each key frame. This may work as you've suggested, but an animated gif won't.