After some feedback, I chose to re-work most of the Solomon rig. I had to fix some flipping problems in the wrists and forearms that was being caused by poor rotation orders, so that meant that I had to completely re-skin the body. Unfortunately, mirroring skin weights doesn’t work very well on this model so I basically had to do the whole thing manually -_-
I also re-did the whole face. This time, I edited the model and made the face a separate mesh from the body so that the blendshapes wouldn’t take up so much memory. I chose almost a completely blendshape-based approach, which gave nice shapes but not as much flexibility as the wire deformer approach on the previous version. There are always trade-offs.
For my next rig, I want to try the Josh Sobel method of facial rigging that I learned from his vimeo tutorial series. It involves “World” and “Local” rigs that are skinned mostly with joints. It’s fast, flexible, and scalable, something that my blendshape-based approach can’t compete with.
Besides that, I also needed to fix some shearing problems with the teeth and gums. They were likely caused because I didn’t self-group the geometry before constraining it to the jaw controls.