I finally have something working in terms of joints sliding on a surface beyond a planar projection. It took a lot of back and forth between Jonah and I, but I finally got past a road block and got what I needed. Similarly to Jonah’s planar projection method, described on his blog, I used a closestPointOnSurface node to place my joint (on my eyebrow in this example). To get this point I placed a locator along my eyebrow where I wanted my joint to be. It wasn’t necessarily a point on my NURBS surface because I knew it would “snap” to that surface anyway. Using the UV coordinates of that locator I was able to drive my joint along my skull surface.
In the screen recording above, I also have a wire deformer set up which explains the deformations not following the joint correctly. The joint is not what is skinned to the eyebrow geometry, the cluster deformer is controlling the wire which is deforming the eyebrow geometry.
I’ve also been working on scripting my process in order to troubleshoot faster. With the help of my friend James Johnson, I’ve been able to get my teeth set up and my eye setup started.
The goal is to properly setup the eyes with lattices for the open eyes and wire deformers for the extra eye shapes. Ons this is complete the animator with be able to switch through all the shapes at will and manipulate them into a variety of poses, all while sliding on the skull surface (which will not be visible to the animator).
3D Rigging & Look Development 
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