Hello everyone. I have not been with Blender since 2.9 and this year I’m going to try and pick it back up again.
Upon opening it I found the last thing that I was working on which was an experimental cartoon face rig.
I used a Boolean to control the shape of the mouth while being able to drag it around most of the face to get a real powerful way to make any mouth shape i wanted without worrying much about the topology of the face.
The part I got stuck on is that the mesh for the boolean which is essentially just a Cylinder with about 16 verts and a sub surf modifier had to be rigged to bones on every single vertex that controlled the edge they corresponded with.
I was very happy with the result however when it came to actually making faces with this method it was painfully slow to position all those bones.
I imagine i could use shape keys or spend the time to make a huge pose library of all phonemes and faces someone could make.
But i thought i would check with you guys first if there is perhaps a simpler way to manipulate the shape of a cylinder mesh that isnt a bone on every vertex.
If not, I am coming back from a huge Hiatus and honestly wouldnt mind much to switch back to normal topology based faces and just share this concept with everyone as a fun experiment.
One bone for each vertex sounds like you’re trying to reinvent edit mode, lol. Yes, shapekeys should be easier. The most flexible solution would probably be four or so bendy bones with a few handle for controlling the tangents and easing values, but it depends on how flexible you want to be. If you already have a list of all the phonemes you might need, and you’re sure the requirements will not overflow, then shapekeys may be the best approach.
There’s usually a trade off involved between flexibility and complexity. If you want flexibility from 16 mouth controls, you need 16 controls.
However, for the technique that you’re using, I think that I personally would like to control this from a curve object, maybe a curve object with 4 controls, and not really worry about their handles.
You can’t boolean from a curve object, but you can use curves to create a mesh object in geometry nodes, and then boolean with that object. So rather than your cylinder, I might use a cube, then give it a really simple GN modifier:
Over on the right, I have the “bevel object” curve, the determines the shape of the GN, with controls each hooked to their individual empty, and a parent empty to rule them all (can’t do transformation mode changes the way I’m doing GN.)
So now we have four controls instead of 16, and it’s super nice and smooth because it uses beziers for everything.
Hey this is Phenomenal! I think this is exactly what I was looking for. Though I know almost nothing about nodes i’m really glad to know what node i need to research.
So i’m off to learn about Geometry nodes then!
I think I remember the bevel object function of curves by making some hair with it before so that should work great.
