OK, so that didn't work. Like, at all.

I remembered after getting into the topology work that I'd actually tried it a couple times before. So, it was no real surprise when it turned out to be at best the same as the baseline topology. But, I still had high hopes for the new idea in wire curves for the flews. Sadly, they failed to live up to those hopes. At best they were about the same, but their worst they were way worse that the original wires.

It appeared to have a couple interesting features for small improvements to the lip wires, but they proved unsustainable one way or another for many of the expressions. The front and back sets showed the most interesting features, which is funny because I thought the two around the flew would be the most useful. The back two had one or two more CVs on the ends of them than the normal lips, which seemed like it might help improve control over the shape of the mouth past the flews, without affecting the cheeks as much. However, in practice I ended up having to use the end ones to adjust the corners and cheeks, too. It was pretty much the same but more complicated. The front wire also looked like it'd be really good at controlling the front lips. However, it turned out to be very limited at getting good shapes, when the flews were in anything but their default position.

I didn't bother to save test result images because they were largely uninteresting. The failed new wires broke the upperlips into 5 distinct wires. I also tried combining just the two flew wires with the normal upper lip wire, but that had pretty much the same problems.


Ah, well. At least I won't forget I tried this time.