Hello!
I am rigging a cartoonish character (not human) and I have some troubles with moth rig. I have done obly upper lip so far.
I don’t want to use shape keys, so I am trying to rig mouth with bendy bones.
I would like to make, say, a mouth expression like this
First, your example is 2D vectors. This kind of animation would be much easier to do in 2D.
Second, your topology is far too dense and is not optimized for animation. Watch some videos on retopology for animation- Dikko on YouTube has some good ones
the weight paint is probably the culprit since the bone’s curvature looks correct…
From there, I agree with Joseph that the mesh could be simpler, you can use less polygon to get the same result and it will be simpler to manage.
Also, it can be better to model the mouth closed, since it can be simpler to open the mouth rather than closing it.
If you are new to blender and 3D, don’t expect to make something perfect from the first try. Basically your first projects are where you’ll learn by making mistakes. So don’t get married with these models/rigs, try to learn the most from them and don’t hesitate to restart at some point with a better basis.
That might sound frustrating but once you’ll get enough mileage you’ll have good results from the start.
I personally use shapekeys to animate a character’s face. Not only they offer much better control, but you can use Audio2Face to automate speech, if you have an RTX graphics card.
From an NVIDIA employee: “Currently A2F only runs on RTX GPUs. It leverages both the RT cores and Tensor Cores of the GPU for the rendering and AI inference, (…)”
I prefer A2F because it is more reliable than facial mocap, unless you go for very high end mocap, because I only tested the Android apps. A2F even lets you animate expressions in Omniverse before exporting the shape key animation to Blender.
There is an addon called FACIT, that will generate the necessary A2F shapekeys for you, but you can also do it manually.
