UDK Morph Sequence
polycounter lvl 9
Hey guys.
I am creating a morph sequence of a character morphing between two states in UDK and while the mesh morph is easy enough, the texture morph is a whole other problem. I have played around with Flipbooks and it seems the problem there is being able to trigger it.
I am now using Movie Textures, with the morph sequence loaded on to .AVI files (e.g white to red), triggered by Kismet. The problem I am having now is getting the Movie Texture to reverse back to its original state (e.g red to white). There does not seem to be a way to reverse this in Kismet, so what I was considering was to create the reverse morphing sequence (red to white) in a new Movie Texture and create a switch effect in Kismet (as opposed to a reverse) to the new, reversed texture.
Is there a way to reverse a Movie Texture and is this the right way to go about it?
I am creating a morph sequence of a character morphing between two states in UDK and while the mesh morph is easy enough, the texture morph is a whole other problem. I have played around with Flipbooks and it seems the problem there is being able to trigger it.
I am now using Movie Textures, with the morph sequence loaded on to .AVI files (e.g white to red), triggered by Kismet. The problem I am having now is getting the Movie Texture to reverse back to its original state (e.g red to white). There does not seem to be a way to reverse this in Kismet, so what I was considering was to create the reverse morphing sequence (red to white) in a new Movie Texture and create a switch effect in Kismet (as opposed to a reverse) to the new, reversed texture.
Is there a way to reverse a Movie Texture and is this the right way to go about it?
Replies
I have actually managed to use a movie texture to create the controllable morph effect that I want, but I will definitely have to try that out as well.
I have not had much luck looking into what a mix map is. Is that just another texture sample, set in something like a multiply to add effects like dissolve/wrinkles/sweat etc?
I have another issue now :S
I am trying to create a character morph sequence that allows for player control over each state of the morph, within UDK.
Ideally I want to create the morph between these two states:
However, although I think I have the mesh and texture morphing aspect sorted, the extreme contrast between the two states means that the rig set up will be wrong for one or the other. This is because the pivot points for the limbs will be incorrectly placed for one of the states.
I do not know for sure, but my guess is that a game like Brink manages this since the two character states are similar enough, for limb position not to alter too much, thus a single rig can be used.
I am not sure what is the best way to tackle this problem. Ideally I want to create this as a real-time event, working without camera edits. As far as I know, it will not be possible to have the rig (after the morph animation is complete) adjust to fit the new morph state, since the weighting of the bones would result in horrible vertex tearing.
Could I code for some kind of adjustment of the rig and how would I go about doing this? I have created .ini files for custom characters before, but this has been for adapting Unreals existing skeletal rig, in the way GeoDav explains.
Would some kind of blend between a two-rig-set-up be possible?
Another idea I was thinking about, was to instead morph the movement animations (forward, left, right, back etc) and avoid having to rely on the rig to animate these. The problem with this is that it is not a very good way of controlling the whole animation/tweening frames.
I fear that a smoke and mirrors effect will be necessary, using camera edits and two different characters rigs. I am not sure how to do this yet, but I am guessing it would involve hiding one character to expose the other. I know this is possible for static meshes, but not dynamic ones.
Any support with this would be much appreciated, even if it means I am going down the wrong route completely.
Frankly you could just have a complex anim tree with bigguy anims in one large bunch, and little guy anims in another, then have a state switch between them to select one branch or the other.
As far as animating, well. yeah you'll need a good rig and likely a semi complex one to transition the scaling for the character and support proper animation for the sizes.
Also the morph itself shouldn't be for the overall body joint position. you can do that with bone positioning. The morph should be for the muscular offsets. I believe UDK's order of operations is morph, then skeletal movement. So you should be fine having the gross anatomy changes be skeletal.
Do you mean create an in-between' rig to transition the scaling for the character?
I am afraid I do not understand what you mean by muscular offsets.
I am aiming to get my custom rigged character to be set up as the player model by following this video tutorial by Michael J Collins: [ame="
But I cannot even see the default character (first person/third person).
If anyone can suggest anything for this or for setting up a custom playable charcater, I would really appreciate it.