Hi
Ive just finished modeling and texturing a character i wanna use in UE. Now i want him te be customizable. So i wanna make a bunch of blendshapes so
that players can customize his appearance. Ive never done this for video game character so my question is do i have to make blendshapes and skinning
in any particular order or dosent it matter? Also any links to good tutorials that give a overview of the whole process would be greatly appreciated.
Depends
If you bake the shape your going to run into problems but if the morph is activated at run time the blend is additive so you can change the shape to anything you wish and for the most part all of the animations will layer on top of it.
The only place you will have a problem could be contact point if the character needs to hold a weapon, for example. Best practice is to create the blends relative to the rigings joints and scale up and down at the root
.
Hi thank you for the reply. So if i understand it correctly, i only bake the animation(body movement) but not the face blend shapes when i export from Maya?
That is correct unless you are making unique player models with their own animations.
The depends comes in if you export the animation key framed using the bind pose and add it to the animgraph as an adjustment pose. If you don’t then the animation is going to pull the scale of the character down to the original rig as imported.