A wicked awesome face animation / morph target tutorial

Since I feel like a bad business owner if I don't pimp the unstoppable art house power of Games Extract every plan I write, here is a quick bit of news. As I mentioned before, the car pack is done and the people pack is scrapped for the tutorial that follows this paragraph. Being that that's the case, I was trying to think of feasible pack options for the future and was stuck. I wasn't even sure if I even wanted to do another one. While doing some client work, I stumbled upon the joys of making explosions.


4.25 megs of explosive entertainment in WMV format

The effects in order are artillary shell, molotov, frag grenade, flak, and what im calling a "plasma molotov".

New content pack? So we'll see what happens. Ok, let's get on to the tutorial.



The Games Extract morph animtion solution
how to unleash the power of Torques animtion system and let your inner animator run wild

I've read quite a few forum posts asking how successfully export morph animation. These threads are, of course, referring to the actual Torque animation type called "morph animtion". This is an old animtion type that, if I'm recalling stories from the old Dynamix guys correctly, was used as a hacky fix for one or two issues, but never considered a viable option for anything else. The lesson learned here is that if the people who designed the tech didn't think morph animation was useful, you shouldn't either.

"Thats blows 98%", you may be saying. "I'm making a post modern / post apocolyptic hybrid MMORPGRTS. How is anyone going to take it seriously if Duchamp's face isn't realistically animated when he's throwing saucy french insults at the nuclear zombie Warhol?"


Don't worry. No one will play your crappy game because, just like that last joke, no one understands it. But I won't stop you from trying. There is, in fact, a way to get things like animated faces (or anything else that traditionally uses morph targets) into Torque. The best part (for me as a teacher and Torque knowledge knower) is that it illustrates that the Torque art pipeline isn't this confusing, rigid "do this, then this, then this" system. It's this incredibly fluid, artist-designed-for-artists system, that allows an someone to make art however they want to and be able to get their result in-game, provided they have a few required elements such as a bounding box, detail markers, etc.

So let's get started.

To begin with, you need to know that anything can be used as a bone as far as the exporter is concerned. This goes back to the "torque is an artists system"; It's a wide open playing field with very few hard rules of play. You can use max bones, you can use biped, you can use meshes, you can use dummy objects, etc, etc. It's all about what you prefer to use. Good ol' buddy of mine and GG creative director Joe Maruschak likes using meshes, because he makes his skeletons super low poly version of the character. I prefer to use bones because Im too lazy to do what Joe does. Just joking, I like the speed that comes with quickly clicking out bone chains. The original Tribes characters (and thus, Kork the ork) are done with biped.

The reason all of these options are possible is because the exporter is only looking at the transforms, rotations, and scale of the pivots, not the actual objects themselves. That means if you have a mesh with no detail number on it (like a bone), its pivot information is exported while its actual shape is not. Conversely, if you put detail numbers on, for example, biped parts, you'll export out the biped geometry.

So, if all you need is something with a pivot, a dummy object or a simple spline or max shape will make a fine candidate for a bone. And as long as they're under the two node base hierarchy (usually named base01>start01), their pivot info will be exported.

Knowing that bit of light theory, you're now well prepared to take on a practical task. If you make a collection of dummy objects, add them as bones under the skin modifier, and weight the mesh to them, you'll have a bunch of morph targets that can be used to do anything you want.

For an example, take a look at this head. It has a face rig that was constructed in the exact way Im talking about up above.


The rectangle shapes are added to the bone list in the skin modifier, and the face vertices were weighted appropriately. I made several animation sequences that were set to blend animation, which makes the following results possible.


Whats more, because they are blend animation, they can be mixed together to produce different results. Here is happy and angry mixed together to get a pretty crazy looking smile.


And here is sad and angry combined to make "utter disbelief".


So that's just a face, but the applications of "dummy objects as bones" are numerous. Animated muzzle flares. Waterfall made out of geometry. The Blob. The thing to keep in mind, though, is that this isn't a "special approach" or -gasp- a "hack". This is doing exactly what the creators of the exporter intended. You have an mesh. You need to make it move. You make something to make it move.

Thats all from me for now. Im more than happy to answer any questions either in this plan or in email regarding this stuff. As always, thanks for reading.