🧵 Fluid 2D facial expressions
Anonymous at Thu, 20 Mar 2025 19:23:43 UTC No. 1009783
What technique did the Ape Escape 2 (2002) CG animators use to make these flat facial expressions?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mb0
Anonymous at Thu, 20 Mar 2025 23:08:51 UTC No. 1009802
>>1009783
Only the prerendered ones are fluid. YOu can see the ones actually taking place in real time are much simpler.
Anyway, it's just a bunch of texture swapping
Anonymous at Thu, 20 Mar 2025 23:25:08 UTC No. 1009803
>>1009783
Cris you have your own thread and the stupid questions to ask these kind of shits, the cat thread is yours too I suppose ....
Anonymous at Thu, 20 Mar 2025 23:44:27 UTC No. 1009805
>>1009802
I should have specified I just meant the pre-rendered cutscenes. I don't think they are using texture swapping for that since it's so fluid
Anonymous at Fri, 21 Mar 2025 16:05:08 UTC No. 1009843
3 main strats
>1 animate the UVs to deform textures
>2 the textures themselves are vectors generated by the shader with animatable parameters
>3 the textures are fully animated
it looks like they did all 3. mostly #3.
Anonymous at Sun, 23 Mar 2025 04:24:05 UTC No. 1009934
>>1009843
The third one sounds like it would get the best looking results so I'll look into that, thanks
Anonymous at Mon, 24 Mar 2025 15:31:29 UTC No. 1010017
>>1009934
animating the textures guarentees results at the cost of much more work.
Anonymous at Tue, 25 Mar 2025 18:40:05 UTC No. 1010083
>>1009783
Super basic mockup but you can use drivers to sync UV warps to bones. Then based on that you can have layered textures for pupils, eyelids, mouth inside, using different UV sets affected by different warps to animate the face, and control everything from bones. You could even combine that with a texture swap for max flexibility.
Anonymous at Mon, 14 Apr 2025 11:45:30 UTC No. 1010989
>>1010137
pondering
Anonymous at Mon, 14 Apr 2025 17:01:02 UTC No. 1011007
>>1009783
to throw my hat in the ring
>eyebrows and mouth seem to be a combination of texture switching and moving uvs around
>eyes themselves are separated into an iris and eyeball and are composited. iris is a sperate texture over the eyeball that can slide around, blinking seems to be a frame by frame animation that changes the eyeball texture
Anonymous at Mon, 14 Apr 2025 18:10:01 UTC No. 1011009
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elq