Alright, I tried to look a little further into manual face rigs and bendy bones. I still have alot of trouble with making the deformations look smooth, especially when closing. The outer ring of bendy bones I made isn’t supposed to be moved, it’s just to support the inner ring.
I feel like my topology is pretty clean and overall okay. But smoothing things out in weight paint mode, knowing whether to use auto normalize or not and having it actually behave the way I want is just extremely hard. It’s very tedious to work with and so I’m wondering if just having shape keys in this instance would be more efficient. On the other hand I’m not sure if I’m just taking the easy way out or if characters with bigger eyes just do better with shape keys. That’s the method I’ve been using so far but it’s also tricky to set up multiple shape keys with different control bones. I probably just need to get better at drivers too, I’ve only been using drivers with simple influences such as “when this bone is translated on Z locally”. But I wanted to at least attempt this other method.
@keihaankarkinen I’m also interested to see the level ik constraint you mentioned, just because I’m still at a point where visualizing rigs without seeing the rig itself is kinda tricky for me.
@thetony20
One of the reasons I wanted to try to get better at doing facial rigs instead of shape keys is because I have a lot of trouble figuring out how to get things like eyelashes to follow the contour of the eye, but I guess in this instance it might just be better to have different shapekeys for the eyelashes as well that activate with those control bones?