Saturday, February 8, 2014

Rigging Cartoony Dog Snout (work in progress)

Hi,

In today's two 15minute sessions i explore lip corner separation of a dog snout.

major take aways
-- possible to do rig testing on cubes (ex. changing number of divisions, using 3 for smooth preview)

-- can combine to mesh two primitives to simulate an upper and lower lip

-- can make soft mods deform lattice to create an upper lip separation effect

-- can use paint blendshape weights with flood of zero on all lower snout vertices to say to generating shape we only want to use your upper snout separation effect…

-- although i didn't test it here i think using this idea of having softmod effet both upper and lower snout in "generating shape" (not the final shape but the one with the lattice were putting soft mods on) can mean we can have a "close to upper lip" control (or "close to lower lip" control) … i think by repeating this process but using the "generating" blendshape of the upper lip effect to now generate a lower lip effect...

Here are some of the process i tested

i start with a shape by modeling two cubes and a nurbs sphere and adding a few divisions...

added a middle division, a lattice, and a softmod to vertices on one side including middle (i used a 5,5,5 lattice or one that had divisions enough to modify the base mesh)




 but i wanted to only effect the upper lip, so i created a blendshape and told it to only use the upper lip part of the upper lip generating shape.


 now i wanted to also have lower lip separation.  so i started creating a lower lip generating shape using similar technique (putting a lattice over vertices on one side including center, then adding a soft mod,  and changing pivot of soft mod to be near the corner ...clicking on blue circular thing)






now we can see how the final shape is using the two generating shapes to get a lip corner separation effect...

another cool thing about soft mods is we can rotate them to to get a cool effect ..

(probably i'll need to figure out some nice animator controls for this kind of setup ...)

Hope this was helpful

cheers,
-Nate


Inspired by Tex Avery
Inspired by Aaron Walsman (aaronwalsman dot com)