Now, I’m having a serious issue rigging this model (since I’m very new to it all) and starting a mouth.
I was thinking I could start modelling the mouth within his lower face portion but I honestly need to know first how to rig the mouth and allow his mouth to slide from one side of his face to the other since he’s more cartoon than real.
I don’t understand how the mechanics work really so I’d really appreciate it if someone could give me some advice on this subject perhaps?
Also his pupils are constrained to the whites of his eyes with an empty in between so I can move them either freely along the whites individually or select both empties and use the scale tool to move them equally.
Just one small problem I’m having is that the pupils sometimes bury themselves within the whites of his eyes and i have to manually rotate them.
I’m sorry this is such a complicated demand but I really have no idea where to start here
Shape Keys are probably what you want. With shape keys you move the mesh around and save it as a new “shape” and use a slider to change from one to the other.
This is an interesting problem - the kind of problem you get when converting 2D characters into 3D.
One option would be to make the mouth a texture. You could then move it around the muzzle by setting the texture’s mapping to an empty, and attach the empty to a bone. Also set Materials > Image Mapping > Extension to Clip, otherwise you’ll have mouths tiled all over Sonic’s muzzle.
The next is to have the mouth as an object floating infront of the muzzle, held to it’s surface using a Shrinkwrap modifier. This will mean the mouth can be animated more easily, but is still basicly floating in front of Sonic’s face.
To get a concave mouth… well- you could look at boolian operations, but they tend to not be that good. The only think I can think of is to have an invisible clone muzzle, Make the mouth-hole in the first muzzle, put bones for controlling the mouth at it’s corners, and constrain these bones to the surface of the invisible muzzle. I think that is what is going on here…
