Yesterday I was able to speak with Sabine Heller, the artist that developed the “strip eyes, brows and wrinkles” as cited here in Ignacio Barrios showreel for Snoopy.
Although our time together was limited, she was able to give me as much information as she could on this particular eye setup.
To achieve this, additional pieces of 2D meshes were added to the main rigs. These pieces of geometry were relatively low resolution to keep it looking as smooth as possible and were then shrink wrapped to the heads of the characters. At the time, Maya did not have the shrink wrap deformer, so she had requested it to be added for this particular film. There were attributes that allowed the 2D meshes to slide along the characters’ heads and to come off the surface as well (UV space vs world space). Micro controls were also added to replicate the “pen marks,” similar to the original comc strips. This setup worked in conjunction with a bump map, so when the geometry was moved in UV space along the characters’ heads, they looked inset into tht surface. There was also an option to offset the mesh from the characters’ heads as well for visibility so there wouldn’t be any clipping of geometry. She had constructed the eye setup in a separate file, and that was imported into all of the character rigs.
In addition to our chat, Sabine also suggested I reach out to Steve Gressack, who also worked on the character rigs for The Peanuts Movie. Outside of The Peanuts Movie, I also reached out to David Gibson, an animator on Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs. While researching their take on surface based facial rigging, I came across an old blog post of his that discussed how he went about animating certain shots of the film. I reached out to him on LinkedIn and he recommended I reach out to Stephen Candell, “the main mind behind the face rigs,” according to David. My plan is to schedule a video call with Stephen to get some more insight on the facial rigs for the Cloudy characters.
Yesterday I also got a reply from Ignacio Barrios, one of the riggers on The Peanuts Movie, whose showreel got me interested in this topic in the first place. I’ve scheduled a video call with him and Adam Burr tonight and I will be documenting that meeting in my next blog post.
3D Rigging & Look Development 
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