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I spent the past week or so trying to come up with a way to get Pinkie’s smile to look more natural while still make sure the rig is animateable and won’t clash with any other parts of the facial rig. Took me a while to come up with a solution, but I thought of one!
 
It’s been a while since I’ve mentioned this, but most of the time when I upload ANYTHING, and I mean just about ANYTHING, it’s to test something out with my models or animation skills or what have you. Recently I’ve been uploading things with cleaner presentation (lack of Metadata watermarks and better lighting and what not). When I uploaded the first version of this I got good feedback and got me going on a fix, which is what you are seeing now. That was my goal all along, but I feel like some people might have gotten the vibe that I thought the previous version of this render I thought was amazing and worth showing off because it’s perfect. I dunno… Could be wrong, just something I feel like has been happening. Just wanted to make it clear that I almost always upload something looking for feedback on something new I’m trying with these models, and to gauge how well it works. I knew the previous version before uploading it for the first time that it wasn’t great. I had trouble seeing what I needed to fix at the time, and publishing it anyway and gathering feedback helps me figure out what I need to do to get this mess of a model to look right.
 
 
Anywho, the reason it took me so long to get this fixed was because of a technical limitation I encountered when trying to get a shape key smile to cooperate with other shape keys that were controller other parts of the face. As you can see here, the smile pushes Pinkie’s cheeps up to her eyes. That causes problems with blinking and other eye controllers on the rig. I also had to make sure I can get the rig to also respect how the head-shape changes depending on the camera angle. The last thing I need is the rig to break whenever she turns her head a different direction relative to the camera.
 
There’s no way I can concisely explain how I fixed this without confusing 99% of you reading this, but I basically stuck to using shape keys for the mouth, but also in addition I used a lattice shape keys for the eyelid part of the mesh (which needs to act as cheeks when she’s smiling) as sort of a bridge. I matched the lattice shape key to the base smile shape key to get the complete expression, and now when the top eyelids shut, they always stay in shape to what the bottom eyelids are shaped regardless of the intensity of the smile and cheek compression, rather than just phasing through the bottom eyelids… … That probably went over a lot of your heads. It’s complicated. :V
 
Also going to note that there have also been some other less complicated changes. The head shape has changed (again) to be shorter and less egg-shaped. The head mane shape has been adjusted slightly too to fill in the top of the head more. Plus it helps make it more semi-show accurate, even though that little extra puff of hair isn’t always there on Pinkie in the show… But it is sometimes depending on the angle. Pinkie’s mane is pretty inconsistent from all angles in the 2D show, so it kind of gets complicated when translating that into 3D. Hopefully this looks better, too.
 
 
So I guess now I should ask: How does it look now? Has the uncanny valley been crossed here, or is there still work to be done somewhere that I still can’t see?
 
(Previous Version For Reference):