Auto Mouth Shape Matching
The tool can use mouth shape drawings to drive the mouth shape changing in Maya. Using the tool, we can have the mouth rig automatically matchs the shape of our drawing. The procedure and result is showed as following. On the right is the input picture, and on the left is the output mouth shape.
The tool uses MATLAB to take in the image and process the image data. Basically the MATLAB code sees the black circle as 2 graphs of mathematical functions. Then it finds local maximum and local minimum of those functions. Then the code considers different cases and output a file with joint position data.
The python in Maya will read the output file and use those data to position controls on mouth properly. The steps are showed in the following video: