Sync deformations on separate meshes?Hello there everyone!
this is my very first post so I hope I’m not breaking any rules. I searched for similar topics before but I think I don’t know the terminology to directly address this issue. I am very new to rigging/animation and although I think it’s a very basic problem but somehow I cannot find any proper approach to it.
So the problem is this: I need to have a quadruped and a separated face/eye part with the same amount of deformation.
The model and the eye/face part are to be UV mapped separately to allow different facial expressions through textures instead of changing the texture on the entire model for each facial expression for a game. There is no problem if this were one big model and then rigged. But that wouldn’t allow a separate UV Map for the face. So if I rig the model with the face detached however the edges aren’t connected and show the different deformations when I start posing the head.
so basically how do I make both face and model go through the same deformations even if they are separated? I faced a similar issue before and couldn’t figure out any way to solve it. Or this even an issue related to rigging? Could this problem solved be at a different point or section?
I really hope someone can help me because the entire project depends on this working out!
Blender has a “Transfer Weights” function you can use in this situation. It is located in the Weight Painting Tools.
However, if I understand your problem correctly, you’re probably making things a bit compliated for yourself.
I think you could rather use multiple materials for the object and only change the texture for the face/eye material when you need to. This way, you can use use a different texture for the face than for the body, but still keep it one model.
You can easily create separate uv spaces by hiding the parts of one map and then unwrapping only the parts of the second map.
You can also make separate UV-Map Data in the Mesh Tab, unwrap the parts that you need for each map and then assign the different maps to different materials (this can create complications depending on your game-engine though).
hey! first of all thank you so much for your quick reply. I will contact my partner and see if this solution works out.
to clarify: We can basically keep the entire model as one but do the UV unwrap so that the “Eye part” is left out and just switch through different UV unwrap setups exclusively for the eyes while keeping everything as one model?
Yes. Provided your engine supports multiple material slots, the easiest way is to assign multiple materials like this:
Add a new Material Slot with the plus, then Select the Face part and hit assign.
If you also UV that part separately you can use entirely different textures on the two parts. (Shown here with different colors)
Okay, that’s a really good piece of advice thank you! I’ll try it out and see if it works out when we implement it into the game engine.