2D Eye Texturing

fxmisc

Hello everyone, I'm new here. I have a few questions. I taught myself how to model and rig, but I'm stuck learning how to texture.

I am trying to get 2D texture of an eye on top of my 3D model like in this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WSLyA7eQWOU

However, the video only shows how to animate the eye, and not how to place it on the 3D model and what he used to make that mesh. Does anyone know how to do this, or any other suggestions on how to get 2D eyes on my model? I don't want to texture the eye as apart of the entire texture map for the body. I want to place it on top of the body. Also, how do you keep the mesh on the face from moving or clipping into the face or floating to far away from it?

I tried to find more videos about 2D eyes and placing 2D textures ontop of 3D models with seperate meshes but all I can find are how to make 3D eyes!

Eric Chadwick

A few different ways to approach this.

1. Copy the face geometry and scale it along the vertex normals. Delete all the faces except where your eye texture will go. UV your eye texture onto the copy. Use a transparency map to clip the edges.

2. UV the eyes onto the face model using another UV channel. Use a multi-layered material to combine the face material with the eye material.

monster

Is this for a game engine? Because the method in the video won't support Unreal or Unity. Both import FBX files, and FBX doesn't supported animated UVs. 

When i worked on something like this I just created a few floating eye geometry shells. Then used a similar Set Driven Key method to adjust the scale down to 0.01.

fxmisc

Thanks for the responses. @Monster, will Eric's method work for Unity and/or Unreal? Because while I haven't had time to learn to program yet, I have a desire to, so that I could recycle the model for games in the future. Because of that, I would like to use methods that would transfer into a game engine if possible.

Eric Chadwick

FBX doesn't support animated UVs, but most game engines support flipbooks, a method of animating the UV offset in a grid pattern.

I haven't watched the video, but all three methods as described in this thread DO work in both game engines.

monster

I believe Eric's method would require a shader that mimics a multilayered material. Maybe he can give a better answer. The only benefit of doing it my way is to not bother with UVs or materials. Since you are just essentially moving and hiding the parts with regular animation.

The method I described I used here (while not eyes, each body part was an alpha'd image):

Eric Chadwick

These are all valid methods. I listed two separate ways. One is essentially mesh decals. The other is multi-texturing. Which approach is best depends on a lot of things.

fxmisc

@Eric Chadwick I had a couple hours today to figure out how to use multiple UV maps as you said in option 2. I think this is the answer I am looking for. I looked up some videos on how to do it, and I figured out how to apply a layered texture, and I uploaded two test images on a cube. One is a skin tone file and another is a smily face with a transparent background, dubbed as "transparent_eye". However, the transparent_eye file, I saved one as a .png, one as a .PSD and the area where it is supposed to be transparent is appearing as white instead. How do I get the white parts around the eye to become transparent?