On September 26th I had a video call with Jonah Reinhart to discuss his personal experience using surface based facial rigging techniques for personal projects and in the industry. He was very kind and helpful in answering all of the questions I had. I also discussed tackling Billy’s “dot” eyes, and asked if he had any advice or experience rigging such simple eyes. He mentioned looking into “Playmobil: The Movie,” as they developed their own method and tools to animate thsir characters faces. The SIGGRAPH paper “Facial pipeline in Playmobil: the movie” goes into detail about the research and development of how their team came up with a texture-free solution to their characters 2D faces.
Unfortunately, that would’t help in my situation, as Billy has actually pieces of geometry for his eyes so I still needed to come up with a solution for that. In the meantime I was researching other films that he had mentioned such as “Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs.” The technique they used for their characters was a simpler version of the Translate UVN Deformer used on “The Peanuts Movie,” but produced almost identical results.
The biggest takeaway I had from my meeting with Jonah was a better understanding of the Translate UVN Deformer.
Leading up to my interview with him, I had come across his blog posts that detailed the inner working of surface based facial rigging techniques.
https://www.jonah-reinhart.com/copy-of-surface-base-facial-rigger
https://www.jonah-reinhart.com/single-post/why-the-uvn-deformer-is-so-useful
https://www.jonah-reinhart.com/single-post/nurbs-curves-translateuvn
As of this past weekend, I came across an old club meeting from a few years ago where he spoke about these particular facial rigging techniques and some scripts he developed.
3D Rigging & Look Development 
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