Phenomes...

[Killerkitty]

I remeber watching an update video for overgrowth. *forgot which version it was* there was dialog going on between 2 rabbits. The lip syncing was pretty darn good, so I was wondering if they were using morph targets *again* or if they made phenomes for the characters.

[Silverfish]

If I recall correctly, we use morph targets for the different mouth shapes. We then generate phonemes from the words in the dialogue that we then use to decide how to blend the morph targets over time to make it look like they are saying things.

[Killerkitty]

I see... so how do you use morph targets in blender? Last time I tried to do that, someone told me to use the shrink wrap modifier...didn't turn out that great.

[akazi]

So in the character xml there is a tag called "morphs"
inside of it you have all of the morph targets used for the game, this is janners xml file as an example.

For the fist you have steps, he has four so in blender you create a simple hand rig with a fist close animation, then you pick what four points in the animation that you want to use and select your
model and export it four times, each time making a change gradually leading into the full fist. Do this for both hands

Here is reinhardts fists when I was working on him.


Here are the model file names.

Your first fist morph has to be named with a zero at the end followed by 1, 2 and last 3. All together you will have 4 hand morphs for that hand.

steps work for more then just the fists, they can work for the mouth as well, though normally you wouldn't. (I used steps for the mouth when I did my alien character port a while ago) Pretty much add the same code as the hand steps and then the number you have. In blender for the mouth I select the vertices that I want and move them in position, or you can also create a few bones for the mouth, so it rotates and closes just as if you had a jaw bone.
Your base model should have its mouth closed btw before you start with hands and such, or else you might run into problems where every time you do a fist, the mouth opens.

For the eyes you can either move the UV islands of the eye so they look in the direction you want, or just move the eyeball itself, if you don't have room to move the islands. its the same as the hands and mouth, each change you do you export into a new model and name it "yourcharactername_look_l" "yourcharactername_look_d" "yourcharactername_look_u" "yourcharactername_look_r"
each species has their own way of doing eye morphs


In the aschar.as script around line 3090 you can see this. You can see the look name is a bit different for each, characters with forward facing eyes like humans, wolfs and dogs use Up, Down, Left and Right.

I hope this made sense in some way.
So morphs are basically changes to the vertices of the model, and then the model is exported. then named and specified in the character.xml

[Killerkitty]

Than you for taking the time to type that! It helped me a lot to understand how morph targets work.

-thank you!