Standard approach to mecanim facial animations?

greenwillowgames

Hey friends,

Wondering the standard way to do facial animations with 3D mecanim characters. Particularly, how do you toggle between talking vs not-talking while separately toggling between expressions? I can imagine three options:

- The talking and not-talking animations use entirely separate bones than the emotion animations, and you use two layers: the talking layer and the expression layer. That way you can use an avatar mask on each layer, and then they operate separately. [this seems maybe plausible, but it seems also likely that expression and talking would use similar bones]

- You export every combination of talking vs not-talking and each expression from your modelling software. [seems bloated and complicated]

- You do some sort of blend tree magic of blending together each combination of talking vs not-talking and each expression. [also seems over-complicated]

Am I missing a great other option? Do most people do one of these three? I'm a 3D noob, so maybe I'm missing the obvious!

ChrisIceBox

Separating speech and emotion animations to different layers is a viable option - you can set them to Additive, so that their effects are combined rather than having one overriding the other.

AC is well equipped to control expressions using Blendshapes, however.  See this tutorial for more.  With this method, you can also insert expression tokens into your speech text - see Section 10.7 of the Manual.