Faking blendshapes in some way

Unity Engine
1

Hi again,

Just a quick question.
I asked before if we could fake blendshapes and then I got pointed to the mesh morph script on the wiki.

I did test the mesh morpher, and it seems like this script indeed contains very nice code to help me out.
However I still have another question.

Mesh morphing is actually a displacement of vertices.
I remember from the previous unity3D website that there was an example which showed realtime moving of vertices with a javascript to show its pure speed.
Would anyone know where to find that demo again on the new site???

Also, I actually would like to make a full body character talk. This means that the body is fully rigged and the head (same mesh) has some kind of faked blendshapes on it.

Now I was wondering. Is it possible in code to DISPLACE the vertices even before the rig is being deformed by the engine?

So to ask it another way. I would need the combination of vertex moving(displacing) but also the rigging/skinning which does its job.
Therefore I would have to be able to displace the needed facial vertices BEFORE the rigging system puts the mesh in its desired position through skinning.

Is there a certain way to do this? Where should I then code the vertex displacement routines to be sure that they happen BEFORE the rigging is calculated for that frame ?

Kind regards,

Bart

2

I’m not sure what your 3d app of choice is, but its quite possible to rig a very elaborate and flexible face with nothing but bones, no blendshapes required. It takes quite a while to set up nicely, but when you’re done you essentially have a bunch of ‘handles’ on your characters face for pushing/pulling their features around, closing eyelids, moving the jaw etc. As long as you keep your weighting under control (no more than 4 bones effecting any one vertex) unity will be able to read a joint-rigged face without any problems.

3

MrAnimator, I understand what you say and agree that this can be a very nice solution. But lets say that I can license existing 3Dmodels very cheaply which are very good looking but use blendshapes for facial lipsyncing. And I want to use them just for those lipsyncing on them, so thats whay I look to fake blendshapes instead of re-rigging.

4

Anybody have any idea if its possible to move vertices in code BEFORE the rigging takes place and moves based on the bones ?