Dynamic facial normal maps!

Hiya!

We've been working on ideas for Lemniscate, and we were reminded of something we've wanted to try doing for a long time: dynamic facial normal maps tied to morph targets. You know: when a character pulls up an eyebrow and wrinkles appear on his forehead, and the like. It took us about a single workday to implement this using UE4 Blueprints (maybe eight hours including creating the normal maps).

We don't want to spoil anything of Lemniscate, so we've applied this technology to one of our characters from OLP, Beat. She hasn't had a singing video yet, so with this, all of the characters have lip-sync videos where they make fools of themselves.

This animation isn't final or fully detailed, the body animation is still in progress so this version is made of recycled, already existing animations. Oh, by the way, we've also made the texture based eyes work.

The quality of this gif isn't great, but you can hopefully see how the normal maps change. We should really make some older characters, this would look perfect on them.

If you're interested, we can probably make a quick tutorial on how to make dynamic normal maps (EDIT: here it is) and texture based eye movement work in UE4 Blueprints.

Just to make it clear, we're progressing with the development of Lemniscate. This is one of the rooms (the staff quarters):

Happy Holidays!

Hi!

This time we're wishing you happy holidays a little in advance. We've realized that our time is a lot better spent working on the actual game at this point, rather than on events and such. If we do end up creating something more holiday-related, we'll post later, but for now, enjoy the morph target and lip-sync test video of Sal (we didn't have any song ideas for Beat yet).

We have separated the detailed facial animation (rendered in Blender's Cycles render), and the full body animation. The full body one is less detailed, it mostly just uses major keyframes, jumping from one major pose to the other. This is only to see what his movement style would be like.

All of this was made in about 3 days (and the face took another 3 days to render....), and it helped us a lot in adjusting morph targets, and getting a general idea of Sal's style.

Speaking of animations...

Sketchfab finally added morph target support (even for stupid ones like ours that are bone-based)! We tried uploading Beat with a bunch of her animations, to check it out:

Beat's Animations by ProjectOL on Sketchfab

You can see the list of animations by clicking on the button next to the seeker bar.Our only remaining issue is not being able to use Beat's eyes (which are texture based), so she just stares into nothingness.

We hope you still like it!

Shapekey Test

We've been planning to post info about the gameplay for a long time now, but we'd rather not discuss it just yet. Instead, we're going to show some interesting stuff.

One of the playable characters in the game is going to be Eslie. I'm going to write about her technical properties today but her story and personality will be covered in another post.

Her lip-syncing is kind of difficult to create and adjust with her being part wolf. Morph targets - or shape keys - deform her base mesh into a given position (for example, her mouth making different sounds). It can be adjusted, how much (a gaping mouth-morph target can be adjusted to become a slightly-open-mouth morph target by changing the values) and when (they are made into keyframes) the mesh deforms. With some effort, these morph targets can be adjusted so Eslie can (almost) perfectly lipsync any given speech.

A demonstration of this:



I (Geril) used a free software called Papagayo that creates lip-sync using sound and text. It's not very accurate, and it doesn't adjust the jaw movement unfortunately, so there's still a lot of adjustments to make after it finishes. It's better than creating it all from scratch, though.

The importing didn't go very well, but I managed to put it all together in Blender ver. 2.63. I also added some very basic facial mimicry to see how it would look.

And the character can now sing. Not in perfect sync, of course, and without any animation on her body... in T-pose. But it's working. (Makes a great imitation of the decapitated robot in the first Alien movie.)