Posted April 29, 2021 by Jimothy Marmalade
I think I'd be pretty well cut-out for advanced 3D animation if I could wrap my head around the basic concepts of it.
Don't get me wrong, I think tools like Maya and Blender are very robust, but learning them and figuring out how to take full advantage of their features was something I just wasn't able to do. So, in lieu of that, I have opted to create "rough drafts" of the animations I desired wholly in Unity. This serves as both my Exploration 6 submission and an official early interactable demo of SnippetQuest facial animations.
The purpose of this test is to showcase what the finished animations might look like and the core concepts behind them, such as:
- The eyes and mouth on a 2D plane in front of the head
- The eyes and mouth being able to move independently from the head
- The eyes and mouth being able to break apart and reshape themselves to form expressions and emotes
Currently, in Unity, the biggest limitation is the inability to fine-tune the animations past moving, rotating, and resizing the individual "pucks" of the eyes and mouth. I imagine using a 3D modeling software such as Blender or Maya would make this possible and result in much cleaner, as well as more complex, animations. The individual polygons could morph and stretch to fill in gaps between pucks to create the illusion of a smooth line, and there could be more personality to each puck instead of sending them directly to their end state.