Solutions and Problems

First off, heres a list of some of the problems I have yet to solve.

1. Teeth and Tongue missing
2. Penetration of hair into face and eyebrows into hat
3. Eyebrow Wrap deformation
4. Right shoulder skinning
5. Stretched texture on planet
6. Roughness of polygons on planet surface

So I've started to go down this checklist, attempting to do some detective work.


Problem 1:

Solved--I discovered that somehow I accidentally included the teeth, the inside of the mouth (dubbed boca burger) and the tongue in my hidden blend shape layer, so I removed them from the layer and after realizing the tongue was in NURBS and I didn't have NURBS visible, I have solved that problem. However, this has brought about some new problems.

1. Penetration of Inside of Mouth Through Cheek
2. Tongue deformation

I think I've fixed the penetration of the inside of mouth through the cheek by moving the vertices of the "boca burger" inward as close to the teeth as possible.
As for the tongue deformation, I've discovered that the tongue deformation gets really weird as a result of scaling Norman down. Below are two images, the top displays the way the tongue looks when Norman is at scale=1 and the bottom is when Norman is at scale .016 (the one I'm using).



After hours of attempting to deconstruct Norman's tongue, I've finally fixed the problem.
Within the Local part of the rig itself there are three different groups that relate to the tongue:
ZGr_Cn_TongueA_Bind
contains the actual joints with an effector that connects to a spline IK outside of the rig
ZGr_Cn_TongueA_Driv
contains a series of groups, clusters and locators which manipulate a curve that in turn controls the deformation of different parts of the tongue
ZGr_Cn_TongueA
contains the controls to manipulate the locators, clusters and groups

In addition, there is a World Group that contains the Spline IK and the curve that the clusters are on.

I discovered that the problem was a double transform, as evidenced by the fact that the joints collapsed on top of each other when scaling the rig as small as I was attempting, and stretched the tongue out when scaling larger. After many trials of using multiply/divide nodes with different parts of the rig to attempt to cancel out these double transforms with no success, I realized that the double transform was in translate X, so I had to figure out how to control translate X of the joints. Lo and behold, there were already in place a series of utility nodes that controlled how much the joints, and in turn the tongue itself moved in translate X based on the spline IK.
A curve Info node, which queried the length of the spline IK curve, was fed into the first channel of this node and was multiplied by a pre-determined number, presumably a proportion of where that joint should fall along the length of the spline curve. There actually didn't seem to be any problem with how these utility nodes were set up--the spline curve scaled with the rig and the second number stayed a constant, so the ratio remained accurate. However, there was a double transform somewhere in the rig that didn't seem to be controllable elsewhere, so I figured using these nodes was the best way to counteract the problem.
To counteract the double transform, I needed an inverse proportion of the placer's scale. So I created a multiply/divide node, set the first input at 1, input the scale value for the placer as input 2 and set the function to divide. Then I duplicated the already existing nodes (there was one for each joint in the tongue chain) and put the pre-existing ratio as the first input. The output of the multiply/divide node (the inverse proportion) was fed into input two, and the result was a ration that would counteract the double transform. This value became input two in the already existing nodes, with the length of the spline curve as input one. Finally, this result multiplied out to become the new translate value in X of the joint.
Below is a screen grab of the connections I set up between the various nodes:

In simpler mathematical terms, lets say Justin's placer scale is A, the original proportion of the curve is B and the total length of the curve is C.

The original node setup read as follows:
B x C = translate X of joint

With my additional node, here is the new set-up:
1/A x B = B/A
C x B/A = new translate X of joint

In addition, the World Utilities Group doesn't scale with the rig, but the IK needs to. However, the pivot of the IK isn't in the right place to scale from, while the World Utilities Group that the IK is in has the pivot in the correct place. So I directly connected the scale of the placer to the scale of this group. The spline curve is also in this group and already scales correctly because its clusters are in the rig, so I merely unchecked the "Inherits Transform" box in the Attribute Editor so its parent group's scale doesn't affect its scale.

Unfortunately, solving this took all day. However, Problem 2 should be a simple modeling fix, and the right shoulder skinning can be copied from the left shoulder to fix Problem 4. Problems 5&6 are texturing problems and while they need to be dealt with, I can attack them a little further down the road.

Its really the eyebrow wrap problem that I want to solve next. Hopefully, I can do it a little more efficiently than the tongue.