LogInJake Harrell simulated lip stickiness.
Artist Jake Harrell showed an impressive demo of his work on lip intersections and cornea-eyelid collision – complicated issues that add a lot to realism if done right.
When you open your mouth, your lips slightly stick to each other, and Harrell wants to recreate this effect using Maya. He wrote a custom C++ deformer to "dynamically resolve intersections between the upper and lower lips by pushing and flattening the contact area."
"This Lip Intersection deformer will first solve the intersection, and then do a post-push on the areas around the meet line for a softer roll into the meet line. Width and strength of this post-pushing is all controllable independently from the intersection solve."
This, he says, makes facial rigs look especially realistic together with cornea-eyelid collision.
When our eyes move under our eyelids, it's visible to people around us, and Harrell wished to set up this movement, which is rarely done in 3D. This custom deformer was written to handle cornea displacement and automatic snapping of the eyelid line to the input eyeball geometry.
The radius, strength, and shape of the displacement can be adjusted to control the final look.
"With this, I wanted to try a setup that was independent of the eye shapes themselves and ensured that the eyelids stayed attached to the eyeball in all poses. In my experience, I’ve found that a setup like this allows artists to simplify their eye look shape workflow by allowing them to focus solely on the eye opening shape in general and the flesh movement around it."
Harrell talks about his project in more detail on his website.
He isn't the first to work on lip stickiness: we've seen similar efforts by Giovanni Manili before.
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