Last week I spoke with my friend James Johnson on the best approach for tackling Billy’s mouth. A surface based solution wouldn’t necesarrily be the best, given how much the corners of his mouth move across his face for different poses.
The solution we decided on was to switch between two different setups. One would be completely blendshape driven, using set driven keys to allow the animator to activate those blendshapes with contollers. The second setup would be joint driven with corrective blendshapes.
The blendshape setup is for the “OO” mouth shape. This way the animator is able to control if the mouth is on the front of the character (for when the camera is directly in front of the character) or at a three-quarter angle (which is the most common angle the character is seen from).
The joint setup is for Billy’s smile. A NURBS surface will be attatched to his lips in order to guide the joints when a blendshape is activated. This will make it more intuitive for the animator so the controls will still be close to the areas they actually deform.
Due to my rig no longer mainly consisting of surface based rigging, it didn’t feel appropriate to keep surface based facial rigging the focue of my thesis. So once again, I am pivoting. I’ve decided to focus more on the actual process of taking an originally 2D character and building a 3D rig for it. My paper will go over the challenges that come with this kind of rig, the importance of keeping the character on model, and how there isn’t a need for custom tools to create such a stylized rig. My visual component will remain unchanged, the only update will be with my research paper.
3D Rigging & Look Development 
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