Hi, I’m a character artist and I want to achieve something like this inside the viewport:Snappers Facial Rig - YouTube
I was wondering how I could go about doing this. And would blueprints be needed?
First some background information: my specializations are just character sculpting/modelling and texturing. I have a general idea of how blueprints work but have yet to use them. Also, I have done several sculpts of faces in zbrush with different facial expressions but have yet to implement wrinkle maps in a game engine. With that said, here are some key subtopics I have come across in my research of this topic:
Wrinkle maps
Dorito effect
facial rigging
Am I on the right direction? Of course I still have to learn all 3, but I was wondering how this all relates to achieving that kind of result in that video posted above.
You can drive normal maps strength by linking them to the morph target, which is done by using animation curves and a scalar parameter inside the material, more info here
For the facial rig, since I use Faceware, 99% of the time I rely on blend shapes facial rig, but also a joint based rig does the job pretty well, it depends what you want to achieve, so you can also use a combination of both
Dorito effect: Never tried to do the same thing in UE4 honestly, but I don’t think its worthed, unless you want to achieve absolute perfection…joint based+correctives shape is more then enough
Thank you for the response Enter Reality. Thanks to you I now know about animation curves
So I was wondering if 2 things are possible now:
let bones drive morph targets
can a set up like one in the video be achieved inside the REGULAR viewport (not animation viewport) of unreal?
To clarify: the setup is able for the user (me) to drag points on the face (these are presumably the bones in the video?) to move that part of the face, which in turn drives the morph targets? And the reason I want to put it in the regular viewport is because I want a specific lighting set up for my character (unless the animation viewport already allows a custom lighting setup…?)
Yes, what you have to do is a kind of clamp setup, where you get a treshold of the angle or position of the joint, so that it’ll act like a SDK in Maya.
Doable as well, since in the viewport you basically see the same thing as in the “game”, so the wrinkles are triggered in realtime. You can build a blueprint and show those controls, which can be moved ( again, using clamp to setup a start/end ) so that they will trigger all the morphs ( or the joint )
In general you can customize and add whatever you want in UE4, but in the case of a “Maya SDK” setup, you have to code it using blueprints
Here is an experimenti I did a 2 years ago, especially to test the realtime wrinkle maps…raw results, but I’ve been using UE4 for like 2 weeks
Thanks a lot Enter Reality! That’s pretty much all I wanted to hear. Your feedback is very much appreciated.
Also that wrinkle map demo is looking pretty good, even for just 2 weeks in unreal!
Not sure how I should go about this, but maybe I’ll post my results and methods in this thread a couple of months from now, or make a new thread, I’m not sure.
