Brace face

Is there anybody out there? Probably not, but I'll post this anyways..

I've started rigging up the face for Walvis using a modified version of a really crazy cool rig my homiez James and Jason created at my work.



It uses splines and bones and a heck of a lot of little helper dummy objects to create a very flexable mouth rig that totally follows the basic contours of the face even when animating in fairly extreme poses. It's perfect for a character like Walvis that has 'hard' forms like his tusks as part of his mouth forms that the lips must slide over. I should be able to animate his mouth with a lot of character and not have to worry about noodling morph tween-targets or anything like that!

And because the bones stretch along the splines horizontally as well, you can get a really lifelike performance with only a handful of controls (haven't hooked those up yet.. ;). It's more fun than a naked midget in a FFD Cage!..

..yeah, I'm a nerd, ok.