For one, I just had to do a full colored variation of that excited bite-lip expression from last week.

I also wanted to give "dumbfounded" another shot. I don't know about that one; a little better I guess but still not great.

The mouth changes actually introduce a bit more flexibility to the model. The combination of new topology, shorter wires, and the shallower lip shape actually has an interesting effect. Last week, if you look closely at the comparison images, you can see that using the same wires with shallow lips has the lips come forward but lose some of the shape. This week (actually a discovered last week but too late to fully test) I determined that pulling the wire cvs forward as with the corners of the mesh, such that they are in the same position relative to local edgeloops, allows me to retain the sharply defined shape of the old deep mouth corners. Additionally, when applying the same cv positions as I would on the deep-cornered model, the new shallow-cornered with the shallow CVs now stretch to the same position as the old mouth.

In effect, I can get the new shallow cornered-mouth to move its corners just about as deep as the old mouth. Certain expressions, especially intense ones like rage, benefit from deeper corners. This new adjustment allows me to get those deep corners, albeit while introducing unwanted some distortion on the cheeks and often pulling them farther from the side of the mouth. I can mostly counter this with adjustments to the CVs and wire deformer weight paints. This comes packaged with the ability to keep the shallow corners shallow.

It's probably as close to the best of both worlds that I'll be able to get.


The upper left "disgusted" image demonstrates that the new changes are not without problems in some scenarios. In particular, the lower back corner of the flew distorts too much with the mouth and the lips develop a very noticeable conical distortion when warped in this manner. Most of all, the new, well defined valley between the flew and the cheeks can be very ugly if the flew and cheeks pinch together like this. I like the definition to the area for the most part, but there's just some situations were it really works against me.