I know it’s unfair to ask the Area community for this, but I am at my wit’s end and need to fix the problem I am experiencing immediately.  And so, I turn to the collective expertise of my Maya peers.

I have attached a scene that I prepared in Maya 2008.  It contains a character mesh (drac03UVs:polySurface), a surrogate mesh (dracSurrogate), and a series of mouth and eye meshes (blink, frown, etc.) Despite the name of the file and presence of a skeleton and control objects, I have not yet bound the character mesh.

What I did was apply the mouth and eye meshes to the surrogate mesh and created a blendshape.  This worked fine.  Then I went to work on the rig for the character mesh.  At some point in that process, and I’m not sure when, I moved the character mesh or a group it was in from its starting point, which was partially above and below the grid with the pivot at 0,0,0 upward so it’s “feet” were planted on the ground at 0,0,0.  Then I attempted to apply a master blendshape between the surrogate and the character mesh, which is where things went horribly wrong.

Now, any time I push the slider for the master blendshape up, the character mesh moves down so it’s on the same plane as the surrogate.  Nothing I’ve tried will stop it from moving.  I haven’t bound the skeleton, so I can’t rearrange the order of the skinCluster and blendShape nodes.  All I can think is that something happened while I was building the rig, where I shifted the character mesh’s position or froze some transformation, and I just cannot fix it.  It’s a tough problem to describe, so Google searches aren’t as helpful as I’d like, plus I’m on Maya 2008.

Any person who could repair and repost this file would earn my undying gratitude.  I’m not trying to be lazy - I just have a thousand things to do with this and three other models by Saturday.  Thank you in advance for any assistance you can offer - please, be my hero!

EDIT: The Attachment window says file size limit is 3500K, but the Area Forum Rules say it’s 1.5Mb.  I pared the scene down to 1.3Mb by deleting most of the blendshapes and all the controls, but it still won’t upload.  It’s not because it’s a .mb file, is it?  Any suggestions?  I’m happy to email it.

The file didn’t come through.
It sounds like the problem is in the freezing of your transforms.
It will now apply your blendshapes as though you moved all of the verts...this happened to me once.
I just had to get everything snapped to the same position and then re-zero everything.
Basically reset the zero point of the mesh relationship.
Then I was free to move everything as I needed to.
Hopefully this helps.
~Ben

How embarrassing.  The upload window says file size limit is 3500K, but the Area Forum Rules say it’s 1.5Mb.  I pared the scene down to 1.4Mb by deleting most of the blendshapes and all the controls, but it still won’t upload.  Any suggestions?

It did the trick for me before...just to confirm:
1)Remove any blendshape nodes.
2)Position the main mesh where you want it.
3)Snap all of the blendshape targets to the same spot...everything should be lined up except the parts of the meshes that are supposed to deform.
4)Zero all of the transforms.
5)Create the blendshape node again.

Fingers crossed this does the trick.
~Ben