Technical Slop

Pui Pui Entry 5

Let's deal with Pui Pui's mouth. I want to use Morpher and some targets to animate his face. Doing his eyes will prove no problem, but his mouth may prove difficult. Let's get busy modeling and see what's up with that.

1) First thing is a multi-sub material so I can keep things straight. Pretty self-explainatory.

2) Started with a box primitive with a few exta segments for the bottom. Bent the verts around, beveled the tops of the teeth a tad, blasted a few polys (bottom and back), then mirrored to the top.

3) For the tongue, I just created a poly that ran around the teeth's verts. Then I gave the tongue an extrude and bevel. I even blasted the poly in the back. It's a simple tongue, with the top slightly above the teeth line.

4) I turned off back-face cull. This is so I would have an easier time creating the polys around the sides and back. Even did the roof of the mouth. Now, where back-face cull kicks in, it shades the polys a little darker. I have no idea why Max does this. Perhaps to tell which way the normals go...?

So far, so good. Although, there will be a little problem with that cheek line in the front. If I pull the corners of the mouth back, that poly/face will be right there. Even though it won't show with back-face cull turned on, I still want to fix it. That would just make me happy.

5) There's that line all fixed. I just divided the edge to add a vert, turned some edge, and pulled the vert back and out some.

6) Time to make his lips. Started with a 5x3 plane, then did some operating: blasted some faces, welded some verts, and turned a few edges. Pretty painless.

7) Moved the lips in front of this teeth, but made sure I had plenty of space to stitch them in. Nothing but making faces between the lips and teeth, and making faces between the lips and cheeks. I even made sure that no lines would be getting in the way when I pulled the corners of the mouth back. Back-face cull still turned off.

8) There's his mouth a finished and ready to go. Nothing but grabbing lip verts and moving them around his teeth.

Tada! Time to play.

I copied the mouth a few times, made a few expressions (smile, frown, and a few phonetics), Morphed them in and made it move. I was actually very pleased with the results. Sure is spiffy running the scrub bar and watching him "talk".

Too bad I'm not going to use it. I decided on not having a full mouth. I'm still gonna morph his face, but just his eyes and lips -- no open mouth movement. Why? Just because. Well, I do have some reasons, but I can't really articulate them. Just one of those things, I guess. At the very least, things I learned here can and will be used down the road in something else. Not a total loss.

Just for fun, I'm attaching the 3DS file in a ZIP. If you can load 3DS files and have the gumption, by all means.