Again, remember that I can’t afford such tools as Motion Builder. I wish I could, but I am a 34 year old cashier in a small town, that has a 3 year old to feed and take care of. I make about $8/hr and get less that 40 hrs/week. I am stuck because I need help from my family. Trying to save even $20 a month is difficult.
I’m taking a shot in the dark to see if I can make a proof of concept build and trying to teach myself a little C++ before put myself thousands more in debt going back to college.
Top down, I’m not expecting perfection. This is any indie game I will likely sell for maybe $5 a pop at most. I don’t expect perfect characters or perfect art, especially in early development stages. I’m trying to find the simplest solutions I can to resolve some of the issues. I’m not looking for AAA quality.
Don’t you just re-target the armature for your character? I’ve watched people re-target the bones for much smaller models. The guy that made that plugin for example, re-targeted to match a child but as I understood it, it sounded like he was claiming to be using the unreal armature. Perhaps I just misunderstood him? Maybe I have this backwards? Maybe he had a custom armature that he re-targeted to the unreal armature? It’s been a while and I haven’t tried this myself yet.
The general concensus I got from asking this very question a few months ago was that you should always create your own character base meshes from scratch. Even then, I did not know that there was any other way to create facial animation other than morphs. So this would not have been the right question to ask anyway as a starting question. I need to understand what I am looking for in a base mesh first.
ManuelbastioniLAB, is the option I’m looking at right now, but it looks like everything is done through morphs. It turns out, this looks like my best overall solution. It looks like I can build the editor I need with his models, however I’m reaching out to the author again to confirm if I can legally modify the exported models. This is so that I can add mouth clusters or at the very least a bone to control the jaw ala talking mailbox, and morph targets for the eyes.
I read one of your posts you made in 2015, and you mentioned that Unreal does not use the GPU to render morphs and it depends entirely on memory. Is this still true, or has this been fixed?
[Edit]
Something I think I missed earlier. Are you saying to just develop my own character mesh, then use the G3 rigging? I was assuming that you were talking about using the G3 base mesh as a whole. I thought the rigging/armature was considered as part of the base mesh? I’m also not sure how one would go about only applying just the framework to a fresh mesh. In that case, I wonder about generating a mesh from Manuel’s plugin, and then trying to apply the G3 framework to it? Again, may be legal problems with doing this.
As a poor man’s solution, and I am trying to avoid this, I could treat dialogue as a text-based adventure. Instead of having animations, you just use dialogue boxes much like Morrowind did. The problem here is that you will receive orders over comms at times when you are in a vehicle in-game. It might feel odd to have audio files while you are in a vehicle and it becomes a text based adventure when you are talking to that same NPC in person.