Stop Staring: Facial Modeling and Animation Done Right

Chapter 5. Constructing a Mouth and Nose

Now you may be wondering why, five chapters into the book—almost halfway through—we're taking our first look at modeling. You need to model before you can animate, right? True, but if you don't know what your model needs to do, it's likely not going to be very good at it.

With the simple spline mouth in Chapters 1 ("Learning the Basics of Lip Sync") and 4 ("Visimes and Lip Sync Technique"), there was something that worked well with little effort: mixing different shapes together at once. They cooperated. You could have both the Wide/Narrow and Closed at 100 percent and the mouth didn't look too bizarre. Since we're not going to build a shape for every phoneme, but simply the elements to create the major ...