A little doodle I did today for an idea I had for the mouth. Going to give it a chance, I think.

The idea is the stuff on the left, the right is only kind of relevant.


EDIT: Cross-pollinating with stuff I typed up explaining it in forum thread:

Up until now I've treated the snout as a single solid block. But what if, instead of having the boundary edges of the flew be flush with the surface of the muzzle, I were to treat them as an extruded shape? I imagine instead the upperlips as coming around the corners and diving behind the flews, emerging briefly in that triangular shape at between the flews at the front. Of course, the lips won't actually be present behind the flews, but rather they simply give the impressing of being a continuous line over which the flews droop. Neither would the front triangle be painted with the upper lips. In a way, this change to the interface between the lips and the flew would be kind of the same as the changes I made for the point where the upper and lower eyelids connect.

More importantly, this thought led me to consider controlling the snout features in a similar manner. Rather than control the flew and the upper lips through a single wire curve, there would be 5 separate wire deformers and curves: 2 for the flews, 2 for the upper lips from the corners to the point from which the flews are extruded, and 1 (if any at all) for controlling the lip space at the front between the flews. This would be more complicated, but separating them out could allow me to alter their influence range independently which could actually simplify the process of weight painting the upper lips (currently the most complicated wire deformer weight painting I have to do because it's the only one that requires smoothing.) Moreover, the flews' wire curves could diverge from the the edge of the mouth and follow its contours up towards the nose in the front and along the new valley in the back.

This, coupled with the 5-edge intersection shapes that accompany the extrusion-geared topology, could result in significantly finer control over deformation and (hopefully) better shape results.