Mouth Help

Support Animation and Rigging
1

I’m making a blocky character rig (Minecraft, if you know what it is) and I’m having trouble with the mouth.

So far, I’ve done this:

http://zippy.gfycat.com/AccuratePoorAsianporcupine.gif

That’s all fine and dandy, but it’s not that good of a mouth for two reasons.

  1. You can’t individually control the vertices.
  2. Look at the shape of a mouth. They aren’t even remotely four-sided.
  3. It’s actually a test thing I threw together in half an hour for this thread specifically. It doesn’t contain teeth or a tongue, but I can handle that easily.

Number 1 can be solved by using a few bones and an armature modifier, but there’s no proper way to do it and it always looks really derpy.
Now, number 2 is where a problem arises. I simply cannot devise a good method to make a mouth that looks good and works well.

However, I have found someone who does.

A user named ProtoZion makes some really amazing animations with these characters. They are of questionable content and some of them are extremely offensive, but they are animated and rigged so well. Take a look at the mouth in these videos. That’s what I’d like to acheive.

Warning: The first video is NSFW vocally.

Can someone help me devise a method to create a mouth like this?
[SUP][SUP]babloop is scary, i do not want the teeth[/SUP][/SUP]

2

Well, first off, you’re not mentioning how you are controlling this character… other than:

  1. It’s actually a test thing I threw together in half an hour for this thread specifically. It doesn’t contain teeth or a tongue, but I can handle that easily.

So you have a simple set up so far, nothing complex.

Looks to me like they are using shape keys driven by controller bones, which isn’t that hard. Notice to the side of the head, there are a few boxes, and in the videos, you see a ring or dot being moved around those boxes. This is the control system for the mesh and it triggers shape keys, I would think.

So the first place I would start is on a good mesh head that has all the verts you’d need to get the shape keys. Example: the eye lids would need to be a set of vertices that you could shape key to extend out, covering the eye. Like wise, the mouth would be all shape keys.

Then those shape keys are trigged by a ‘switch board’ set up. That is, control bones that when moved, trigger the shape keys.

Yea, a bit of work…

Randy