Texture distortion on mouth

#1

Hello all…I’m having some difficulty rigging a character’s mouth and I was hopping someone here could provide some insight into the issues. I’m trying to rig this character for a real time app using morph targets, and the corners of his mouth are giving me a multitude of problems. As you can see, when I bring the corners of the mouth from the default/smile position to make an “O” shape, the texture becomes very distorted and warped. Part of this is by necessity because I have to stretch out the verts around corners to make the lips puff out around all sides of the mouth (this is a specific request by the client).

Currently…I don’t see any way to do this except to send it back to the modeling/texturing stage in a better pose to have the uv’s layed out again, but if anyone here has a suggestion I’m willing to give it a try. If that is the case and we need to go back to the previous stage, does anyone have suggestions for UV layout to avoid this happening again?

#2

I would suggest to NOT model/texture/rig the mouth at an extreme pose like a smile. Hitting another extreme pose like a “O” or pucker shape with the level of detail you have on the face with be hard to avoid the texture problem that you are having. If you have your face model at a Neutral pose (with no expression), then you only need to go about half of the way for a smile, and the other half for an “O” shape. This will limit stretching on the texture…

The other thing i suggest, and its kind of hard to see on the pic example u provided… but when you create an “O” shape make sure its not just the lips coming together. Think muscle groups… The cheeks should be effected. Doing so will lessen the gaps you have between polys, and therefor not stretch out the texture as much.

Hope this makes sense and good luck.

#3

Move more cheek polygons forward for “U” shape. You’re currently using just the three narrow rings for that - instead, the whole cheek should be stretch. It will fix the look slightly, but for better results, as skealeye suggested, remodel might be required. You can as well assemble an example scene with wide/narrow morphs and get that back to texture artist, he could have a look how his UV layout works in other shapes and maybe change that, as well as texture itself.

#4

Appreciate the replies :slight_smile:

I agree you are correct…but I’d just like to say that I did originally have the cheeks affected as you describe…and was specifically told by the client that they wanted the cheeks to puff out slightly. I know it’s not correct, but they’re very adamant about what they want.

Ok. Again, they’ve been incredibly adamant about modeling it in that pose despite our efforts to convince them otherwise…maybe with these results and another opinion they’ll hear us out.

#5

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