What technique did the Ape Escape 2 (2002) CG animators use to make these flat facial expressions?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mb0zEIV9N58

>>1009783 (OP)
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

>>1009783 (OP)
Cris you have your own thread and the stupid questions to ask these kind of shits, the cat thread is yours too I suppose ....

>>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

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.

>>1009843
The third one sounds like it would get the best looking results so I'll look into that, thanks

>>1009934
animating the textures guarentees results at the cost of much more work.

>>1009783 (OP)
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.

>>1010137
pondering

>>1009783 (OP)
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

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elqbkOpg_14

There are other ways to do this by using atlasing of face textures and layering via shaders to allow for texture scrolling and a bunch of other crazy things.

This is the setup mine uses. I'll show the material setup in a moment.

>>1011114
here's the node tree. a bit complicated, but maybe you'll get it.

>>1011116
>>1011114
Very informative, thank you for sharing!

>>1011114
Is this Blender?
Sorry I'm completely new and just scrolling by and this caught my eye.
How did you get the sliders on the side to customize the face? That would be perfect for my animations.

>>1011396
Imagine the face texture is a sprite sheet, with all the variants next to each other. The slider just moves the UVs around the sprite sheet. Do the same for all layers (pupils, lids, brows, etc)

>>1011396
>>1011401
Yes, it's Blender. and yes, that's pretty much it.
Each sheet has a set of face texture layers attached to it like with megaman Legends, only it's a bunch of them to allow for basically any expression to happen.
Here's the mouth sheet to give you an idea, since it works off an array rather than just a slider.

>>1011401
>>1011419
Any videos/tutorials on how to do this?

>>1011421
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E96m9Z4iTcc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ujNzklKkkZ8

>>1011424
I genuinely thank you.