Morph targets on LODs
greentooth
Hello.
I got a skeletal mesh with working morph targets and I created LODs using Unreal´s skeletal mesh reduction. The LODs are very fine, but the morph targets don´t work anymore on them. They do work on level 0, but not below that.
Is there a way to keep the morph targets working?
Thank you : )
I got a skeletal mesh with working morph targets and I created LODs using Unreal´s skeletal mesh reduction. The LODs are very fine, but the morph targets don´t work anymore on them. They do work on level 0, but not below that.
Is there a way to keep the morph targets working?
Thank you : )
Replies
https://www.unrealengine.com/en-US/blog/unreal-engine-4-22-released
But I remember reading in a forum thread somewhere, that it doesn't generate morphs in LODs yet, but they are working on it and hope to get it in a future update. Their road map has future work listed after 4.23 as "Built-in Skeletal Mesh Simplification" so that is the earliest you might see something.
https://trello.com/c/HcvbAifS/119-built-in-skeletal-mesh-simplification
The only tool that I know of that will successfully generate morph targets for LODs right now, is Simplygon.
https://www.simplygon.com/
Personally, that is a lot of morph targets for a character in unreal... That many morphs might a serious performance hit, but that depends on the game and what else is going on in the scene when they're active.
If it was up to me, I would use more joints to do some of the major shape deformation and use morphs for subtle details that joints can't really pull off. That way you aren't relying on morphs to do all of your facial animation and the face doesn't go completely dead when it starts to LOD. In the LOD tool you can cull out bones so you don't have all of those joints active when the player is not near you.
I mean I get why you would want to animate with morphs, I've used a VERY similar setup for a pre-rendered game I worked on. It was amazing to setup, a dream to animate with and looked great, but real time games are just now getting to that point and I don't think they're quite there yet, at least not with that many morphs.
The setup I had even for the pre-rendered game leveraged bones for the eyes and lids, jaw, nose, brows and cheeks. I mostly use them for touches around the eyes, brows and mouth. I think I capped out at 32 morphs and 13 of them where for speech/phoneme shapes.
Good luck!