Morph Targets for character creation (issues with eyes and teeth)

Development Character & Animation
1

Well…after a lot of trial and error over the course of 5 days, I really need some help. I used MakeHuman to create a basic character. Now…I want the player to not only select that character ingame, but to actually customize its face. To do that, my “base” character has all the facial features morphed down to the min. values and I created several "diff"models for all the different morphable areas. Created the morph targets in 3ds Max, deleted the diff models, exported from 3ds, imported into UE4 etc. and it worked perfectly fine…or…so I thought.

Now here’s my problem:

let’s say I change the vertical position of the eyes or the size of the eyes etc., I run into a big one. The eyeballs don’t follow up/down on vertical eye position changes and if I make the eyes bigger, I can see the empty space all around the eyeballs. How exactly can I make the eyeballs adapt to both - eye position and size? Same goes for the teeth.

Other than that the morphing works great and is really easy to do. I’m pretty sure I missed a step or two in Max. Never even touched morph targets and animation…but…well…if you want to a make a game on your own, you have to learn a lot in all departments :wink:

2

Are your eye and teeth models separate meshes? If so youll need to make individual morph target lists for them too and drive all morphs for all involved meshes simultaneously.
If the eyes and teeth are part of the same model then youll have to re-adjust the morph targets to include those deformations.

An option would be to make this via a bone based facial rig and apply facial customization via aimOffsets on the facial bones. - That would remove the need for multiple morph targets on multiple meshes. - But it might look wired when the facial animation gets applied, would need to test it.

3

Ah thanks. The eyeballs and teeth are separate meshes indeed. So I just have to add the morph modifier to them, add the same morph targets basically (from the “diff” eyeballs) and simply drive the face and eyeball morph targets simultanously in UE4? Sounds pretty simple - thanks, man :slight_smile: Will give it a try once I got some coffee… :smiley: