Ribbon rigs were used consistently throughout this rig, creating surfaces that matched the edgeflow of the geometry and creating ribbon setups using follicles. The nHair system was used for creating a number of follicles on the ribbon surface, to which the skinning joints were parented to. The last step was to create joints on the each end of the surface as well as joints inbetween that were later then skinned to the surface. That way the follicles and the skinning joints were automatically moved, driving the skinned mesh when moving a driving joint.

For the shader I needed masks for the wrinkles and bloodflow textures. The first decision I had to make was how many texture maps I was going to use. With RGBA and inverting the remaining space gave a total of five masks, which actually provided ten textures through mirroring around the centerpoint of the face.

For optimizing purposes, this could have been handled differently, but I decided to go with two texture maps. This way I could fit six wrinkle masks and two bloodflow masks and together with a smooth step operation I could mask both sides of the face. By multiplying float values and then adding them together to work as a lerp-value, switching between the normal map and the wrinkle map, I could control where to blend in wrinkles. The float values were exposed and controlled through calculations in the node editor.