I just finished playing Half Life 2, but what I did realize while playing, that one character actually while making the smile animation, got wrinkles in their face when doing it, between the nose and the mouth like it would happen in real life, but how did they add that level of detail considering Half life is a 11 year old game, and how to add that in UE4
Morphing aka shape keys together with lipsync, no biggie lol
What you want is blended normal maps
You would take your blendshape/morph target and sculpt the details, and then use an image mask to define what areas will be changed. After that, I’m not sure how to set it up in UE4 but you would link the blending of the normal map to a morph target and it would automatically blend–I don’t believe that UE4 has this feature by default, but I remember a thread from a while back where someone was getting it to work themselves.
Yes, that’s what I thought they used and I didn’t find any threads about it, I think I’ll make a scalar parameter at the end and set it as black and multiply it just before plugging it into the normal, and then set it manually through BP to white, when I want it to show
I wonder if there is a way to find the value of the blendshape in blueprints and link it to the value of your scalar parameter. I made this system in UDK with FaceFX but haven’t tried it it UE4 yet.
What do you mean with “find the value”?
You know the range from -1 - +1 (when using standard full range) of the morph / shapekey.
Sure it is possible to link the morph to anything you want. You can “set morph target” and insert exactly value there, or drive it with a connected timeline.
you will probably have a driving facial animation, you can set notifys in that clip for all key sections and have a value for each map interpolate towards max till they reach the notify then decrease. You can use fInterp or fInterpConstant for different results, or use a custom curve with an exponential function instead.