In our case we deemed shape animation to be not very efficient. It has too many downsides.
In the case of faces we used enveloped faces with nulls driving the envelopes. We chose this route because it means we don't need as many poses per face to make credible face animation and the storage requirements per pose are minimal because only the deformers (nulls) need to be stored. It also means the poses are transferrable to other faces even if the topology is dissimilar as a system can be devised to map the pose of one face to another through some user defined criteria. If topology needs to change, only the modified portion of the mesh needs work (weighting) and animation/poses are preserved because the information is in the nulls, not the mesh. Finally, animation can be performed through a myriad of methods, including the animation mixer which allows for a variety of interpolation modes. If using shape animation, any changes to the topology would require rebuilding all the shapes - which is very time consuming. Considering face animation is a very iterative process, you want to minimize time consumption. Shape animation requires more storage as the delta of each vertex position for each shape must be managed. At runtime pushing the vertex positions of each face shape contributing in animation is a bottleneck too. The real downside is the interpolation of face shapes as interpolation between shapes is almost always a linear path between vertex positions in each shape - makes the face look rather robotic and lifeless. Long story short, anything you can do with shapes you can also do with enveloped face rigs, but the reverse is not true. Matt -----Original Message----- From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]] On Behalf Of Eric Thivierge Sent: Tuesday, May 14, 2013 6:07 AM To: [email protected] Subject: Re: how to bring shape animation to Unity3D Hey Dan long time! I'm not sure if Unity support blend shapes. My knowledge of Unity is extremely limited but from what I've heard from some sources is that most of the gaming platforms these days don't support blend shapes. I've been told that the face rigs need to be skinning based. I'd love to be wrong though. Eric Thivierge =============== Character TD / RnD Hybride Technologies On 13/05/2013 8:20 PM, Daniel Kim wrote: > Anyone know how to bring Softimage animation to Unity3D? > I tried plot shape animation and export it, but it seems not working > in Unity3d. > > If someone knows, please let me know how to. > > Thanks > > -- > ------------------------------------------------------------------- > Daniel Kim > Animation Director & Professional 3D Generalist > http://www.danielkim3d.com > ------------------------------------------------------------------- > >
