SMIRK - Freeform Facial Features v1.0

Create Facial Features independent of the head, draw and animate them with Grease Pencil!

SMIRK is a small collection of nodes, most notably the Transparency Boolean, that will help you create so called "Detached Facial Features", an approach that was used and coined for Pixar's production on Win or Lose.

It separates the Mesh of the head from the mouth which allows incredibly free movement independent of topology. Best suited for simple, cartoony characters.

This implementation is based on Edward Urenã's interpretation of that System:

A system I also broke down in this video:

SMIRK comes with a bunch of additional features, most notably: Grease Pencil Support

This allows you to draw on the surface of your head and use it to drive the transparency of your material, essentially cutting out the area of the drawing. Most use cases will be for a mouth but things like eye sockets are possible using this as well.

Allowing Grease Pencil to carve out your mesh while also having a simple mouth area be generated around it enables you to animate 3D mouths frame by frame by essentially drawing it.

Simply download the .blend file and either append the node groups or put it into an asset library. The Nodes are allready marked as an asset.

Better documentation will be added for this as soon as possible but until then, hovering over each property of the Transparency Boolean should give a tooltip. The Trailer contains a quick setup guide and the Video above goes more into detail when it comes to the "conventional" mesh mouth setup.

I will also post more videos about this tool on my social media pages over time.

Music used in Trailer: Fleece Snowkbs by PilotRedSky

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