Workflow for Morph Targets (Unity Engine) and Normal maps!

kiraykell

Hey everyone!

I'm a 3D modeler working on a character that needs morph targets for an extreme facial transformation think something like a "Venom-style" mouth opening, with a lot of jaw and face deformation. The model will be used in Unity in  PBR shader (with normal, ao, etc..)

My questions are:

• Do I need to sculpt and bake a high poly version for each morph/blendshape stage (e.g. neutral, mid open, fully open)?

• Should I have separate normal, AO, and roughness maps for each of these morph targets?

• I'm planning to create 3 to 5 key blendshapes to control the transformation — but I want to keep things optimized and avoid overcomplicating the optimization.

If you have any workflow tips, examples, or resources, I'd really appreciate it!

Thank in advance for the advices!!

Eric Chadwick

Morphing usually only changes the vertex positions, it doesn’t do any changes to the material nor textures. So you only have one normal map.

However you would have to implement your own custom setup to also blend textures at the same time. It just wouldn’t be a default workflow.

It’s also more taxing on performance & memory. But doable!

kiraykell

Eric Chadwick said:

Morphing usually only changes the vertex positions, it doesn’t do any changes to the material nor textures. So you only have one normal map.

However you would have to implement your own custom setup to also blend textures at the same time. It just wouldn’t be a default workflow.

It’s also more taxing on performance & memory. But doable!

Hi!, thanks for the answer!. what do you mean with blend textures?  you mean in the engine?

Eric Chadwick

Yes. You would need to create a C# script which blends textures (or whatever values you want for each morph) at the same time that the vertex positions are being morphed by your morphing rig. 

kiraykell

Eric Chadwick said:

Yes. You would need to create a C# script which blends textures (or whatever values you want for each morph) at the same time that the vertex positions are being morphed by your morphing rig. 

Thaks Eric!, i going to search for more info about texture blend in Unity and see how we can do it (i hope with shader graph Xp).