Switching mouthes rig

Support Animation and Rigging
1

In stop motion animation, the animators don’t modify the eyes and the mouth, they switched them from a pre-made library (http://www.toolfactory.com/products_aux/prod_images/9206_s1_full.jpg). I do I acomplish this effect in a rig?

2

Hi! i think that you can build your model looking at the cookie flex rig model by blender cookies. this kind of rig uses drivers, which are a sort of internal programming language that modifies properties and parameters of blender and if you look into the flex rig you can see that there are pose libraries that switches between pre set models of the same rig
I dont know if there is a simpler way to achieve this result but this allows you to change the mesh per frame of your character, for instance of the mouth or eyes

Cheers
Sparazza

3

I know that rig, and I thought I would use a same technique. but I don’t know how to do it. I know how to use drive for transfomation variables and other properties but I don’t know how to build a mouth library.

4

I’ve done a couple of rigs with replacement mouths:

My first proof of concept with Suzanne

A more complex rig getting a first test

A later test with this character

I found it a bit fiddly to set up, but I’d barely used drivers before doing this. The basic idea was to create all the different mouth shapes as separate objects, then using a driver object (I used a rotating spinner as a helper object), switching the visibility and renderability of the shapes.

If you really want I can send you a rig to pull apart, but for now I’ve attached a pdf here of the notes I made to myself as I was trying to figure this out. Not meant as a tutorial but might get you started. I do want to do a tute on this soon, but not enough time right now.

Hope this helps :slight_smile:

Attachments

Mouth replacement proof of concept.pdf (649 KB)

5

Thanks! I will take a dipper look in your file when I’ll have time.

6

In the older versions you could just keyframe layers. I think a set of copy location constraints for the mouths to an empty parented to you mouth area would work. they would be off in the background somewhere and snap to or from the head as needed. A crude solution, yes.