Face Rigging Week, Day 1 (Patreon)

With a big contract coming up, this week I'd like to focus on rigging Daisy's face.  Or at the very least, figuring out HOW I'm going to rig her face, and whether my ideas even work.  Today I started simple, focusing only on her eyelids.

Daisy's eyelids presented two potential problems - do they have enough detail to close around her eyeballs, and does the rigging script I wrote back in December still work?  (I added other functions to the script file since then, and couldn't remember if I'd updated the eyelid function)

The script was the first thing I tackled - it worked, but not quite how I'd like.  When Daisy closed her eyes, the points for the upper and lower lids should line up perfectly,but didn't.  Fixing this meant changing the script, which runs the risk of breaking it...  but the changes work.  Her eyelids now line up when closed, and beyond that the rig works the same as it did before!

As for whether the geometry would wrap around the eye, the only way to test that is to attach the model and properly weight it.  Fortunately, with the right settings, her eyelids do indeed wrap around her eye without any problems!

There's still more work to do on her eyes - replacing the eyelid control shapes, adding direct and aim controls for the eyes themselves, plus pupil controls...   but once those are in place, I'm essentially in unknown territory.  Everything up to this point I've built and tested before, but the rest of her face rig will be new to me.  I have my ribbon script, and ideas on how to tie the entire rig together...  but no experience to tell me that it all will definitely work.  'Fun' times ahead!