ChrAfonso
commented
10 years ago Good idea, thanks for creating the issue! As there are different possibilities to implement these, I'd like to do a quick brain dump of my thoughts on these so far (mostly theoretical as for now - Some of this I already wrote in the other related issues, I hope it's not too redundant :))
- Blend shapes: using a neutral starting face and blend shapes "Happy" and "Angry", we can dynamically blend between them via script or animations, or in the simplest case just set them to 0 or 100 for instant switching. The Brad head (bradgolf7) currently in the Assets folder already has the "Happy" face available, which can be manipulated via the Inspector GUI or by adding a script using GetComponent(SkinnedMeshRenderer).SetBlendShapeWeight(0, value); Video of this in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXUVdGHgh2U
- Textures: Alternatively, we could use three textures and swap them out according to the current player state. These would be easier to create and modify, but I don't know how transitions/animations between face could be done (animated textures?).
In both cases, a standardized naming scheme should be in place to make this independent of the current character/head model used - "Neutral", "Happy", and "Angry" seem to be the obvious labels ;).
Some specific caveats I encountered with blend shapes created in Blender:
- Before creating shapes, all mesh modifiers (mirror etc.) have to be applied, or the shapes will not be exported. And Blender won't apply modifiers when there already are shapes present - so all shapes created before applying the modifiers can't be used and have to be redone.
- The "inactive"--"fully active" range in Blender is [0..1], but after importing in Unity, it's mapped to [0..100], despite the Unity docs stating: "At weight 0 BlendShape has no influence, at weight 1 BlendShape is fully active"
People are moving ahead with facial animation, so it's better to push this out into its own issue rather than cluttering up #3.
To start with, we're looking for: