An easy way to create lip facial blend shapes

I always knew the soft seleciton tool in maya was powerful, but today I realize that I have underestimated it's power. I had no idea the "surface" option existed. I never bothered to look into the settings to see if there was any way to alter the fall off mode. A naive move on my part.

    The surface mode is blowing my mind in how easy it is making it to fix and model shapes such as sneers for a facial shape, or an elbow bent at 135 screaming for a corrective. Before today I stayed away from the soft selection tool for sculpting/modeling where vertices are in a clump, but not, any, more. I'm just having one of those moments in maya of where once you discover that special tool, you just can't imagine ever working without it.


The option can be found under the tool settings here

And to illustrate my point of how awesome the soft select tool just became to me, here is an example of attempting to make a quick sneer with soft select with
volume's fall off mode, maya's default mode

click to enlarge

And here is soft select with surface fall off mode enabled

also click to enlarge

As you can see, the soft select fall off is now grabbing verts based off the "surface" as opposed to just anything in the immediate area. It is ignoring vertices on the lower lip that the volume mode would usually grab. You can see how this fall off mode can prove very useful for certain tasks.

Thank you.