Game Development Reference
In-Depth Information
Tip
Once the face shapes have been applied to the main face, you can delete
them. However, I recommend keeping them in the scene for as long as
you can. This allows you to easily edit them if you need to.
The animator will quite happily use the Blend Shape window to animate the character. If
you like, though, you could use Set Driven Key to tie the blend shapes into the main head
controller, as you did with the joint setup.
Facial Animation and LODs
You have now worked through two approaches to facial animation on Kila, but what about
the LODs? Giving a character the ability to be seen talking might be unnecessary at a dis-
tance, but you may need it for the next level of detail.
Forthejoint-basedface,allthehardworkhasalreadybeendone.Becausealltheanimation
is applied via the joints, we can simply bind the lower LODs and then copy the weighting
information across. We will be covering this process in
Chapter 14
.
The blend shapes, however, will need further work in terms of LODs. These shapes refer-
ence a copy of the face's geometry, so we will need to create the required blend shapes for
all the LODs. This might seem a daunting task, but getting organized ahead of time will
help. Before you start, consider what will actually be seen at that distance and what the
geometry will allow. Dolly out until Kila is just about to switch to her next LOD; then use
the Blend Shape window to see what face shapes are visible and actually distinguishable.
Certainly at this distance you can see that her mouth is open or closed, her eyebrows are
raised or lowered, and her eyes are open or closed. The smile is clearly visible, but the rest
of the mouth shapes can hardly be seen, so it wouldn't be advisable to re-create these for
the lower LOD.
With the blend shapes created and applied, you can use the Connection Editor to connect
the lower-LOD blend shape nodes' attributes to the higher ones. When you animate the
highest LOD, the lower ones will follow; that means you and the animator don't need to
animate each individual LOD.
Grae's Facial Animation
Now that we have some experience working with the two main styles of facial animation,
it's time to take a brief look at Grae.
