Thanks, Les! As always, your input is very much appreciated. I'll have a look at the things you mentioned.

A few things to keep in mind, though: first of all, the 'smile' morph is not meant to be used on its own. It makes the mouth wide, nothing else. If I do that with my own mouth, I can assure you that I look very goofy, indeed. I think the smile you would like to see, with the corners of the mouth drawn upwards and not receding backwards, is a cartoon smile. Human beings can't do it. I may be wrong, but I've been very careful about getting the shape right, based on my references and my instruction book. By the way, no one says you have to use that morph at full strength.

Another thing is that each face is different. When I make that shape with my mouth, my nostrils widen considerably. That doesn't mean it's necessarily right for Antonia. So I'll look out for that when I play with her.

Further on, the maximal jaw rotation that's meant to happen is 20 degrees. If you want her to open her mouth wider, you have to make your own morphs. I'll set limits for the jawLower actor to enforce those bounds.

As for slaving the jaw to other morphs, I'd rather you didn't. Use OpenMouth and add whatever else you want to do via separate morphs. There are morphs to pull the lower lip up and down. Use those. Of course I can't force you to do things like that, but that's how what I'm building is meant to be used. If you don't like that system, you're very welcome to build your own, alternative one.

So MouthOpen is essentially just a JCM, except that the jaw joint doesn't use bending because I felt it would just be too difficult to get the inclusion/exclusion spheres right. I think that's the reason for that ridge that's pulling up from the inner mouth and obstructing the teeth. Something weird happening with Poser's deformation computations there, I imagine. Anyway, I've noticed that problem, and I'll try to fix it.

Finally, I realize a control for opening the mouth in the head actor would be useful. I'll add that, but first I wanted to get all the functionality complete.

In the meantime, I've noticed that some channels seem to be missing from the tongue actors, and that I can't set the joint parameters properly, probably because of that. So that's the next thing I'll have to look into.

PS: I was considering renaming the 'Smile' morph to 'Wide'. But I think it will be easier for people to realize that's what they need to use for a smile if it's called 'Smile', even if it is not really a full smile.

-- I'm not mad at you, just Westphalian.