Swappable Hands / Mouths (alternative to blendshapes) implementation question

Development Character & Animation
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Edit: So as far as I’m concerned this is solved - there’s a node that lets me hide a bone + its mesh and the mesh I’ll be making multiples of is few on the vert front, rigidly parented, ect. The only reason this would be a bad idea is that morph targets may perform better / linear animation could look nicer than snapping. But the ability to edit my mesh post-morph-map creation, reuse, ect. outweighs any possible performance loss I can imagine. Not to mention I’m already getting some benefits from this by dropping 2 full materials - 1 of which would’ve been alpha masked, and saving a little bit of texture memory. Most likely I come out looking alright on the performance front.

So I chose a horrible time to post this as I’ve gotta leave soon but I thought I could solve this. Got pretty far.

Summary of the technique: Instead of blending between shapes you just make the different mouths or hands in separate poses (similar to blendshapes) and simply “hotswap” them. The question is of implementation (workflow and performance mainly).

I’m also not terribly positive if this is a better idea than using blendshapes / morph targets. I just saw that Nintendo does it, noticed the limitations of blendshapes and thought it a good idea.

Literally being pulled away. Copy pasting.

It seems that the mouths being separate meshes is actually very important.

So, yeah. Just place all of the faces together, give them a bone that controls their scale and set them all to 0.

  1. If hidden theoretically they go 100% un-rendered
  2. If scaled to 0 they’re still “there” but are they drawn?
  3. Regardless they have to be moved with the skeleton. The question is whether this price is high? What if the mouths aren’t bound to anything and are simply attached to a socket?

I believe the mesh is imported as “separate” - as in, each mesh object is imported separately despite all of them being in the same FBX file. This is actually stupidly smart as it makes the creation of the assets quite easy. That said, it then becomes a question of the cost of reimporting everything all at once aaaaand… yeah pretty obvious that you don’t want to overload the FBX file

Reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A2gXyEyy_2U ; Look for the Super Mario Galaxy Model ; SORRY! Thought I had more time. Stuff closing restaurants… halp.