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faroucstudio

I have a project I am working on. I have to create several facial expressions as well as custom morphs to change the size of the head, nose, ears etc for a custom avatar to be able to create different faces from the same base mesh with in Unity.

Something like the system in Daz studio, but not as extensive. Since the Daz assets do not have an advanced facial rig, I was assuming they use morph targets. Can someone shed some light on this please.
I know how to create morph targets / blend shapes and use the Paint Blend Shapes Weight Tool, to paint out or in areas of influence etc. This of course works great for creating the individual facial morphs of the lips nose ears etc and or the facial expressions.

However, once I create the custom face , then if I wish to apply the expression the obvious happens as the face reverts back to the original shape etc of the expression.

I guess my main question is how do I make a morph system for just the head (no body attached) that will allow me to customize shape and size of individual facial features and then allow me to assign preset expressions , (sad, happy, contempt, etc etc.)

any advice would greatly be appreciated.
Thank You

Richard Haseltine

In DAZ Studio a morph is just a set of deltas - changes in the position of the vertices. You can apply multiple morphs and the deltas will be added together to get the final position of the vertex. So to make a morph that affects only one part, leave everything else unchanged - the deltas for the rest of the mesh will be zero (will not, in fact, be stored). The deltas for expression morphs will be added to the deltas for the shape to give a final shape - in extreme cases a correction morph may also be needed but there's no issue of one morph resetting another in general.

faroucstudio

Thank you Richard for the fast reply. I do use DAZ for different purpose's and I think it is a great application. But the project I am working on will not be used in DAZ. It is being created using Maya and will be imported to Unity. Perhaps I am not explaining myself correctly or might be missing some thing in your response.
What I am trying to do is use my base head mesh , create a library of morph targets.. Then in Unity , give the user the ability to customize the heads base appearance with using the morphs (much like you can do within DAZ) and then apply the expressions to the customized head. But what I am getting is the head then reverts back to the original shape/expression of the base mesh. I hope that made sense.

Richard Haseltine

Ah, I did misunderstand - I thought you were wanting to create the morphs for use in DS and were thinking it would behave as the other tools. Unfortunately I have no experience with Maya or Unity - though, borrowing terminology from other applications, you might look to see if you have a choice between relative and absolute morphs (or something similar sounding), relative would probably be what you wanted if so.