Mouth tests

Ok so yesterday myself and Alec spent the day experimenting with mouths for our gorillas as it was kind of a modelling priority. We discussed thoughts and I showed him my expression sheet to give him an idea of the sort of mouth I was invisinging. We agreed it needed to be an actual hollow mouth rather than a simple tube like ring that everyone does when they can't be arsed to do a proper mouth (guilty as charged with Lil G!). In that case to be a proper mouth and still look like playdo we would have to go down the wallace and gromit style route. I explained to the guys that if this piece is to be show reel worthy we should include teeth and make it one hollow, fully blend shapeable, playdo mouth - industry standard - u get me.

So we set off on an adventure to see who could make the best mouth first - sticking to our designs of course. Alecs Gorilla - William has a long droopy shaped mouth, where as mine - Cornelius a stretched triangular shape. We both succeeded by mid-day in creating an open hollow simple mouth with nostrils - all one piece of geometry. I tweaked mine and placed it on the gorilla to get an idea for size and made a quick set of nashers to get a feel for the how the mouth could look mid sentence. I spent a bit of time texturing it aswell to get an idea for how clay-like it looked. Both our mouths looked great by the end of the day and Alec even began making a few simple blendshapes for his which worked perfectly - ooo's, ahhhh's, eeeee's etc.

We were both suprised how easy it was to model a mouth when you dont complicate things and think about poly count, rings around mouth, edge flow, complex throats etc! KEEP IT SIMPLE!Just start with the basic shape, extrude inwards and work from there, adding detail as you go, keep edge loops to a minimum and remember - smoothing helps alot.

Anyway so yeah I grabbed a few screenshots of how it was looking wednesday evening....























(It is a hollow mouth not a ring mouth! It just looks like a ring mouth because I pushed it into the head so you can't see the back of the mouth/throat which is also blue. I need to pull it out a bit)

However.... It was not until today that I hit a few snags with my mouth. Alecs was working great, the blendshapes looked so simple yet effective, but mine was really really hard to blend into a new expression because of the amount of vertex's I had modelled it with, and the complexity of the shape. Closing it was just about managable but not without pinching and a huge lip. As far as OOooo's and eeee's, it just couldn't hack it. So I compared mine to Alecs and realised I would have to restart the mouth. The difference was Alec had modelled with far less polygons and used a simple rectangle which when smoothed produced the rounded edges needed. His mouth could be literally squashed into all the shapes needed without deforming and had no extra edge loops added for roundness. I copied his style of modelling and applied it to my triangle shape and after half an hour or so had a much more efficient and functionable mouth. We both agree it doesn't look quite as good as my previous mouth (above) but it will be far easier to animate and blend. I am going to produce my blendshapes tommorow and post up the vids of them in action, I will also post up the screenshots of the new mouth aswell as some funky bamboo glasses I modelled during lunch yesterdaY!.......