I’m trying to create a rigged model of the skull and muscles of the jaw joint. It’s the most complex thing i’ve ever tried and I was hoping for some pointers:
Should I retopo the skull/mandible or use the high poly sculpt?
How do I rig the jaw disc so it slides accurately? will I need simulations for this?
I’m trying to illustrate problems that can occur if something mis-aligns the way the teeth and jaw fit, making the bone shift in the socket as the teeth come together. ideally I would have accurate animations of the motion but maybe I could get away with stills…
I’m not an expert on animation, but it should just be a simple rotation, with the pivot point being around the upper corner of the ramus (the little tine that’s closest to the acoustic meatus, aka the earhole, to be exact).
thanks but its not at all. the jaw joint actually slides on a disc. it partially rotates and then slides forward as it rotates further. the most complex part of the human body mechanically.
You can rig it easiest by just parenting the jaw rig bone into another bone that is in the correct angle related to the sliding motion. That way you can do the sliding by moving the parent bone on its local y axis. Then you just animate it so that the rotation and the sliding are timed correctly.
You should change the shading mode into smooth, now its flat and doesn’t look good because of that. If you use bone parenting instead of weights it’s very much more efficient to calculate for the software and high poly count doesn’t matter that much.
I wanted to test it also myself. Not sure if the anatomy of the motion is perfect, but the idea is this. Just for demonstration, I subdivided the jaw bone several times to get almos one million verts to it, and it still runs smoothly in real time in viewport because of bone parenting:
The jaw mesh object would be parented to the Jaw bone. That bone would be used for opening/closing the mouth. Rotation on the other 2 axis of the jaw is handled by Jaw_Loc_Rot bone and it’s also used to keep the jaw located correctly to the skull.
It’s the same thing as @keihaankarkinen suggests, just a different bone layout.
oh that’s fantastic! I’m actually planning to go a lot more complex through because i want to show the motion of the disc and capsule and connected muscles.
did you sculpt that skull yourself? it looks amazing!
The skull is from the demo file of human base meshes from Blender site, I haven’t even tried to make a realistic skull myself yet. It’s CC0, so it can be freely used for anything, link below:
Here is my skull so far with teeth and 4 main pairs of jaw muscles. My sculpting skills are pretty damn lumpy still but i’ll go for a non-realistic putty play-doh look
Not sure if the anatomy of the motion is perfect, but the idea is this. Just for demonstration, I subdivided the jaw bone several times to get almos one million verts to it, and it still runs smoothly in real time in viewport because of bone parenting:
It’s CC0, so it can be freely used for anything, link below: