Controlling your tongue

The tongue is very important when animating your character, helping to create good facial expressions which are fundamental when animating dialogues. Although subtle in essence, it makes a big difference when animating your character while it's saying things such as "hello".

Not only when speaking, but what if your character wants to have an ice cream?

How to do it...

1. Open the file 004-Tongue.blend from this book's support files. You'll find our character's face rigged with shape keys, lattices, and a jaw controller as the result of previous recipes.

   If you move the Jaw controller down, you'll see that there's a mesh called Otto_Tongue inside the character's mouth. It is parented to the D_Jaw bone, so it follows the jaw movement.

2. Enter into the armature's Edit Mode and add a chain of two bones for the tongue, as you can see in the next screenshot. Name them D_TongueBase and TongueTip and make them both children of the D_Jaw bone : (Ctrl + P) | Keep Offset.

   

3. Enter into...