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I'm fairly new to this community and blender. This is a model I made for a more cartoonish style show and I have a few questions before I move on to rigging the face and body.

Right now this model is about 8 separate objects; the body, the shirt, pants, shoes, eyes, eyebrows, mouth lining and teeth. My question is should I make the whole model one object before I go to the rigging process?

I'm more worried about the clothes cause I think it will become a problem in weight painting. As for his eyes and mouth, I don't know if it is best to have eye cavities or just make the eyes flat disk that lay on top of the model. I need the model to be able to make expression as seen in the expression sheet at the bottom. It might be easier to get the different eye shapes if I change the shape of the eyes instead of, moving the skin over the eyes. Since the model is meant to look 2D not 3D, it might be better, but the shaders might not react the same. (or that could be an excuse not to do more work) I think learning shape keys might be more difficult then just rigging the face. I would love to here this community's thoughts on this process. I got tired of drawing for 4 days to animate 7mins so I moved to blender.

This is the current model example of how i model the eyes example of mouth and teeth This is an example of the expressions I need the model to make

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If you remain into Blender there is no problem in leaving 8 separate objects as your character, while if you plan to export it on others softwares you'll have to check their own limitations.

The character is simple, but the expressions are relatively complex, so I think you'll need to use both armature and shape keys.

Shape keys are quite simple to manage, just check the idea of using drivers, so to have control bones that trigger shape keys: in this way all animation data will be stored into a single action.

About eye sockets, it really depends on how you want to manage eye expressions: if you can "jump" from one shape to the other you can simply switch between textures (or portions of a texture), while if you want to interpolate you'll need an advanced rig, which again I think it can be obtained with a mix of bones and shape keys (and I would go for an orbit hole and a semispherical eye).

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