Hello.
I’m a beginner and I am working on a horror game. One of the characters has this mode where he rips apart his face to reveal a different face underneath, and that is now the look of the character. (yeah, quite gory…).
I’m stuck on how to achieve that. There are two elements:
The animation itself needs to be kind of brutal, with blood splattered around him and all of that. And I’m not sure how to do that. I can make a character run, jump, crouch, etc… But I don’t know how to make it spew blood from wounds.
The second thing is changing the character’s look on the fly.
I realise that I probably need to switch models and the animation is a sort of transition between them, right?
But I can’t find a proper tutorial on how to do it, or best practices or anything really? Googling it just took me to a bunch of stuff about changing the skeleton or animation.
So can anyone please explain how something like that should be done, or point me to some resources?
I’m not a deep animator so I don’t know where to steer you for the second part, but I can tell you that for the blood you can use a Niagara effect! It’s a pretty deep system, and you’ll be able to find loads of tutorials around, along with hand-crafted effects on the Epic store you will be able to use as a starting point if you want to tailor it to the animation (just be sure to credit the creator if you do this)!
The first is to add additional bones for the “normal” face, and skin the “normal” face to those bones whereas the “gory” face is skinned to the underlying neck/head bones.
You then animate those bones moving when the character rips off the face.
The second way is to build the animation using morph targets, and drive morph channels.
The third way is to build two heads, where the “normal” head is the one with additional bones (or channels), and attach/detach the head meshes as appropriate. (There will be a time when they’re both attached, while animating the ripping.)
