Homie's face

MOUTH

So I started with a closed mouth bored face. First, I built many seperate joints on his face. For the first ring, just around the lips: almost joint per vertex ratio. Second ring, about the same ratio. For each ring I have a middle joint + 5 for each side + corners. Then about 4 joints for each cheek, 5 for the chin, 3 for the nose, and 3 for the inside of the mouth. My original plan was to rely on good weighting to produce perfect blendshaped by using these joints, but, as it turned out, I don't think I have enough joints, or I didn't weight them right (only spent a day or two on weighting), so once I have it pretty close to what I need I duplicate the head and tweek it to death by using clusters, and plainly moving vertexies around. It's trickier than it sounds, because I have many layers of blendshapes, and they all need to work togoether. Fortunately the model is very simplified, but it also takes time too keep it smooth and slick - artifects tend to be more visible on simple, smooth models.

I have made these blendshapes already, and they all work pretty good together:
Upper lip: left, middle and right down; left, middle and right up (6 blendS).
Lower lip: left, middle and right down; left, middle and right up (another 6).
Mouth wide.

Still to go:
MOUTH OPEN, Mouth narrow1 + Mouth narrow 2 (tweened blenshape to preserve roundness), Mouth up, Mouth down, corners up and down. Upper lip puff, lower lip puff, upper lip in, lower lip in (11 more).

Maybe ---------ROB LOOK AT THIS:
Jaw forward, back, turned left/right. Mouth rotations (6)?

Then once all these babies work fine, I'll set up the controller system. It's going to be stick on controls. I have it all figured out, it's going to be great. the emphasis is on easy animation. It's a little complicated to describe, but I'll provide an illustration once I'm done with the blendshapes.


MOUTH SECOND LAYER

After we have a seperate head which is going to be a BS for the mouth, the actual head is going to have a lettice around the mouth area (my character has a droopy mouth/chin area, and I want it be highly strech/squashable), which is rigid bound to a 2 joint IK (which is setup with squash and stretch). This way I can have nice arcs and overlapping action for the lower part (I want it to have a big-drop-of-goo feel).

Additionally, the tonque is going to be Spline Ik or something. The teeth are seperate pieces (modeled already), and they'll be set driven-keyed to the controls.


UPPER HEAD

Haven't thought about it too much yet, but it's definately easier than the mouth. The eyes are going to have scalable pupils. Eyebows are going to have around 4-5 BS each, with some influence cylinders to creat forhead wrinkles. Oh, and Eyelids would be plainly clusters or joints, pivoting at exactly the middle of the eye-ball, weighted properly to the lids (1 joint/cluster per lid), then SDK to the eye controler.

Then, lattices with set driven keys around each eye / brow area. And maybe anothe nonLinear on top of it all for the entire top :))))))


HAIR

Haven't figured it out it, but probably modeled hair with jiggle deformers. I want to have a possibility to pose the hair too, to make the facial expressions even clearer. ROB - Problem is, see, I tried to do this with another character, and I just used 13 different pieces of geo with a small IK chain in there, then I SDK to the controller, but it took me forever to do, and homie's gonna have at least 50 of these!! any suggestions?

Later!