We'll start off with a couple of very basic but also very important shaped keys.
Click on the plus button to create
a basis which will be the original mesh and then two
more shape he's which will name eyes closed and mouth open.
These expression tests will be helpful as building blocks for
further expressions and to make sure that the eyes,
teeth and inner mouth work well with the current model.
So let's start with closed eyes.
I recorded some reference material on myself to give some real
life examples on how to achieve expressions in a believable way
for blinking or just consciously closing and opening your eyes.
We need to slide the eyelids along the eyeball surface towards each other
but it's not just that
the upper eyelid is visibly going most of the way
down with those eyelashes pushing the lower eyelashes slightly downwards,
the lower eyelids
Only move up a little bit of the way to meet the Upper one.
There's also a clear downwards arc to the closed eyelids.
The crease above the eyes when having the eyes open also pretty much
disappears when the eyes are closed since all the skin is pulled downwards
as of course way more details on realistic eyes.
But we will just apply a simplified version of this to the stylized character.
Make sure to have the right shape key selected and enter edit mode
enable X symmetry so that the changes on one
side are carried over to the other as well.
If you're not sure if the head is perfectly symmetrical,
then delete one side again and use the mirror
modify before you get into any shape keys.
Now we want to edit these edges of the
eyelids first which will be easier with X ray shading
but first you need to define a pivot point to rotate the islets around
which should be the eyes itself.
Go back into object mode and select the eye and set the three D. Cursor
to the selected object
if that would work because the origin of the object is slightly off.
You can also base it on a selection and edit mode or just literally eyeball it
then back in edit mode on the head,
changed the pivot point to the three D cursor and start
rotating the edges of the upper eyelid from the side view.
You can also do it from any other of you. Just make sure that you rotate along the X.
Axis,
Ideally the upper eyelid should move like 3/4 downwards in an
arc from one corner of the eye to the other.
Afterwards you can move the edges more freely to give
them a bit more space and fine tune their positions.
You might also notice some problems with the symmetry.
Just fix these areas separately.
The same changes also need to be made for the lower eyelids which only move a
little but upwards to meet the upper eyelids
and become more or less straight themselves.
Then make sure that both eyelids roughly align
Now the 3-4 extra edge loops we added for the eyelids come into play
all select them and slide them down towards the ends of the eyelids.
You can also slide the last loop a bit inwards since
it relaxes the skin around the eye a bit more,
removing the crease that was there before even further
with a multi resolution modify enabled,
we can always see our final result but turn it off when
you want to edit the actual mesh in edit modern sculpt mode,
even though it's not very important for the shape
key to look good while sliding the values.
It can be very helpful to see what is moving where
right now. The eyelids probably don't quite touch each other when subdivided
to make fixing this a bit easier. We can create a few vertex groups.
These will help us select and adjust specific areas quickly
to define them.
To select a portion of the head.
For example,
anything above the corners of the eyes and then assign it to the eyelids.
Upper vertex group,
repeat this for the other verdicts groups islets, lower mouth, upper and mouth.
Lower.
To edit these shaped keys in a bit more detailed way.
I can generally recommend to enable this button for shape key. Edit mode.
This will show you the mixed results of all your shape keys in edit mode and self.
Just the currently selected one.
This way you can slide the value of any shaky and see the result while editing them.
Then select everything in the vertex group eyelids lower and hide the selection
in sculpt boat.
That geometry is then still hidden and won't be affected by your brush.
Then push the upper eyelid a bit downwards to push it into the lower eyelid.
You can also adjust the eyelids further
if there are any intersections with the eyes or other issues,
ideally
the loops should also have a bit of even spacing between them
to not create any hard edges when subdividing the islets
as a tip.
Again, hiding geometry can help when selecting specific portions of a mesh.
Since loop selection and growing selections is being stopped by hidden geometry.
This way you can select loops on the eyelids specifically
if you want. You can also exaggerate the downward arc of the closed eyelids.
In my example on the screen it's rather straight
now. It's time to do the same thing. But in reverse
for the open mouth,
the mouth opening is a bit more tricky since it isn't just skin sliding
but way more interactions with the jaw bone and muscles moving the entire thing.
When we open our mouth,
it doesn't necessarily have anything to do with
muscles pulling on the skin around the lips.
The draw bone rotates downwards and the skin and
muscles around it are being pulled down with it
since the lower lips are connected to the upper ones. Fear the mouth corners
the upper lips also being pulled on but also being held back by
being connected to the nose and being pushed against the upper teeth.
This keeps the mouth corners roughly
slightly lower than the middle.
The interesting thing is that the jaw starts unhinging itself.
Once you open the mouth a lot
muscles are pulling the jawbone forward while it continues to rotate outwards,
the jaw sinks more into the neck and a bulge forms around the pivot point of the jaw.
Now let's apply this to the stylized character.
Make sure to have the open mouth shape keys selected just to be
sure that you don't do any unintended changes to other shaped keys.
It happens a lot if you're not careful enough.
Again use the vertex groups to select portions of the head more quickly.
In this case the lower mouth
then de select the back of the jaw and neck.
You can do this with lasso selection
also make sure that X ray shading is still enabled.
So you can select
through the object.
You should essentially have the lower lip, chin and most of the draw selected
Now from the side view.
Set the three D cursor from where you want the jaw to rotate from.
Also to interject you
in hindsight.
When looking at these recordings,
I set the three deckers are pretty far off its way more accurate to set it in front
of the year at around one third or half of the height of the of the ear.
Of course this also depends on the proportions and stylization of your character.
After setting the pivot point to be the three D. Cursor.
You can now rotate the selection
with a bit of connected proportional editing
with a sharp fall off curve.
This can already pull on the upper lip
and surrounding skin while rotating.
You can rotate it right to the point
where the jaw should start dislocating and bulging.
Now in sculpt mode you can fix the stretch geometry and other issues.
The first thing we can do is to smooth
out the neck where the skin and fat should accumulate
a clay brush with a bit of auto smooth can do wonders here.
The stretched faces along the cheek also needs some smoothing but be
careful not too smooth too much without adding some volume back.
Otherwise the cheeks will become very flat.
The back of the jaw likely also needs a bit of reconstruction
by adding volume back and pushing the corner of the job back
another tip.
If you just want to slide some skin back and forth without much volume loss or gain,
Then use the nudge and thumb brushes here.
Just make sure that pressure sensitivity for radius and strength is disabled.
And that the stroke method is set to dots.
You can also hide the lower teeth gums and the tongue for now
push and smooth the lips a bit to get the slightly stretched old shape.
Yeah,
but be careful with a smooth brush since it can easily destroy your model shapes.
Just keep rotating around the model
to look at the mouth from different angles and adjusted further
slide the value of the shape key to compare.
Or just check the little checkbox to enable and disable it.
The stretching and loss of volume of the cheeks is definitely
important but make sure you don't lose volume on the cheekbones.
The volumes of the face should always be kind of consistent,
just like when you're sculpting the clothes
in chapter two,
the bone structure should be the main thing
that keeps the proportions of the head together.
In this case the cheekbones,
jaw and teeth as well as the more solid structures of the nose.
If you mainly think about the opening of the mouth in those
terms and then shift around the fat and skin around it,
then it is easier to understand how to
make these facial movements look more convincing.
You can then continue to fine tune the shapes as much as you want.
Also make sure to look at this with wire frames enabled,
since the skin should be pulled all over the place,
not just directly where the bones and muscles are moving.
This will make it immediately look more natural
now that the mouth is open, we can clearly see the inner mouth with the teeth better
at this point.
If you want to adjust these areas,
definitely select the basis shape key and select and sculpt from there.
Otherwise these changes will only show when you enable the open mouth shape key,
which would look very weird if you want.
You can create a second jaw movement shape key to push it further,
dislocate the jaw and bolt out the muscles at the cheeks.
But I'll keep this relatively simple for now
when we unhygienic other objects now becomes clear what
is missing though the inner mouth objects for example also need to move with the jaw.
So for this create a basis and mouth open shape key.
Make sure that you have the mouth open shape is selected on all of these
objects and then enter edit mode on all of them at the same time.
Then with the same pivot point as for the jaw, rotate the mesh along the X.
Axis to fit with the open mouth.
The same thing of course needs to happen to the eyelashes.
So do the same thing over here with an eye closed shape key
in this case
the eyes were the pivot point for the eyelid rotation.
So rotate the measure of the eyelashes to roughly match the islets.
Too much general position but also more importantly match the rotation.
Of course this doesn't exactly match.
So align the mesh further and edit mode or sculpt mode with the closed eyes
if you want to sculpt it into position.
I can still recommend to use this snake hook brush
since it also rotates the mesh a little bit.
Now of course once you really get into sculpting the
expressions we will be mixing shaped keys left and right.
So it will be great if the shape keys of
different objects are moving in unison and not separately.
The way to do this
in blender is with drivers.
Drivers essentially make one value affect other values.
So for example we can make the shape key in the eyelashes,
copy the value of the shape key on the head.
To do this.
We first need to know the name of the data
block that the shape key of the head belongs to.
If you have python tool tips enabled in the preferences you can read
the name when hovering over the shape key values on the head objects.
So in this case it reads key 0.0. R. One for me.
Another way to find this information is to open up the object
in the outline er and open up the object data there.
You will see the little green key data block
now. Right click on the value of the closed eyes shape key and click on copy data path.
Now on the value of the closed ice shape key on the eyelashes.
Right click on it
here at a driver which will open up a little pop up with some settings.
This might look pretty complicated but you can mostly ignore most of these.
First off set the expression two plus 0.0 instead of plus one.
Otherwise it will always add an additional one
to the value which we really don't want.
We want to copy the value from the other shape key exactly 1-1.
Then click on the little axe dropped down and set it to a single property.
So it will only look for a single input which will be the value of the other. Shapey.
Then set the id. Type two key.
And in my case
it was key.001.
Then paste in
the data path that we copied earlier.
And this is basically it.
So now the driver will look for a single property in the key
dot oo one data block that is matching the path that we gave.
You can see that the value is being driven by the purple color on the value.
And if you now slide the value of the shape key on the head,
it will slide both shape keys at the same time.
So now repeat the same process for the open mouth and the inner mouth objects
copy the data path at a driver, change the expression two plus zero.
Set it to single property.
Look for the key data block
and type in the name of the same one as before.
Then paste in the data path you copied
to get the same driver on other inner mouth objects
just right click on the purple value
and click on copy driver then paste the driver on the shape keys of the other objects.
And with this, all of it is set up
with all of this, you are ready to get into the rest of the expression sculpting.