Eye Rigging/Animation

[Fantomasas]

@Enter Reality;457515

Regargin mobile games I saw that most of the time eyes are textures, so the blink is an animation sequence ( eye open, eye mid closed, eye closed, eye mid open, eye open again ) rather then being controlled by joints or morph target.

1. Doesn’t really matter, because at the end of the day it should be skinned to the skeletal hierarchy in order to rotate around and move accordingly to the head movement.
2. Texture animation will do the trick and it’s quicker to do…you can animate the pupil if you want with morphs, but because it’s rather small I suggest using textures.
   3.Tech is always evolving and the specifications for mobile games right now are different, so I will say that you can choose between using joints for eye movement rathern then morph targets ( more expensive then joint driven animation ). I use morph targets everywhere ( especially for facial animation ) and they work pretty well and performance are always good, so it’s up to you really which way you want to use to animate facial expressions/blink and so on

Thank you.

2. I guess I am going a texture-based animation route for the pupil. Follow up question: how should I prepare the UV for the character model then? Should I separate eyes from the rest of the character for the texture purpose? I assume it would be inefficient to have only a pupil animation on the 2k or 4k character UV. Perhaps it is more efficient to have a single morph target for pupil dilation rather playing around with animation based textures. I can easily loop the line where pupil starts. I might be overthinking this, but it would be nice to make it right the first time.

3. I believe morph targets are for me then: both faster and easier. I can just force vertices into positions in Zbrush rather than playing around with skinning eyelids.