I’m Sybastian. I have had this question floating around in my head for some time now and I’m finally to the point where I have to figure out how to model the mouth of a character in a way that will allow it to be moved and animated for speaking and expressions. I have never done it before and I can’t really find any video tutorials to show what I need to know. I’ve used the Rigify Armature on my models before, but never had to worry about the mouth until now and it’s kind of a daunting task for me because I don’t want to model everything and find out that I have to delete my work just to start again the correct way. Does anyone have any links or tips for me as to how I can accomplish this in Blender? The engine I’m going to be using is Unity if that makes a difference at all. Thanks guys!
I don’t know what Unity parameters call for, but in general, heads have a jaw bone that moves the jaw, lower lip and lower teeth, basically opening and closing the mouth, and use shape keys for everything else. If Unity cannot use shape keys, then a set of bones, centered roughly in the center of the mouth cavity (so rotating the bone moves the tail along the surface of the face), might be used to move various portions of the lips and cheeks to create similar expressions. I have not seen any rigs actually set up like that.
As far as the actual modeling is concerned, here I think a picture is worth a thousand words.
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The loops go all the way around the lips, and extend into the interior of the mouth. Gums and teeth are generally modeled as a separate mesh, sometimes even a separate object. The lip loops extrude back into the head to form a cavity holding the teeth and tongue.
Okay thanks Orinoco. As far as the separation of the lips is concerned, do I rip the vertices in edit mode before I even start sculpting? That’s the main thing I’m having an issue with because if you don’t rip the vertices in edit mode and extrude inward to create an actual cavity there isn’t a way to get the mouth to slice in sculpt mode. I’m pretty sure I should just do the former so as not to run into the problem the latter creates. I’m just trying to get an idea of what the common practice of the modeling and rigging of the mouth is.
So I’m still pretty confused as to what the generally accepted practice to modeling and rigging a mouth for use in a game. Anyone have any resources I could check out to get more familiar with it? Otherwise I’m pretty much stuck at this point because I don’t want to start doing it a certain way and find out that it was the wrong way to do it…