I am interested in OpenUSD for portability of content. Instead of being tied to one rendering engine, my content can be rendered in multiple tools. At least that is the OpenUSD promise. But there are practical issues, one of which is materials. How to create materials that work across multiple tools? One project that gets … More OpenUSD UsdPreviewSurface Material Portability
What are the normal stages in creating an 3D animated video? There are variations depending on whether you are doing a full length movie, a short film, a TikTok video, or (as in my case) a motion web comic series, but there is more in common than is different. So here are the phases of … More My Stages of Animation Production using VRoid Studio and Unity
If you have watched Suvidriel’s YouTube channel you will know you can have multiple textures for your VRoid character face, clothes, etc using tiling. This allows you to add a blush to the cheeks, tears around the eyes, etc. This blog describes some quick tips for doing this more efficiently in Adobe Photoshop. Here is … More Tiling for Expressions with VRoid Characters
This post includes an update on my plans to do expressions with VRoid characters for the purpose of creating short animated video clips using Unity and VRoid Studio characters. Note: The main value of this post may be the summary list of blendshapes and how they move parts of the face below. The tables can … More Example Expressions from Blendshapes with VRoid Studio, HANA_Tool, and Unity
VRoid gives you a lot of flexibility over many things of a character, but arm thickness is not one of them. You can control the muscular/plumpness of the chest somewhat, but there are no controls on the arms. This can look a bit strange when the rest of the body is of larger dimensions, but … More Unity Blendshapes to add Muscles to VRoid Characters
I wanted to have a character ride an electric scooter. I am not going to worry initially about mounting and dismounting, but I do want the character to have the hands on the handlebars as the scooter turns left and right as it moves. Later I would want to scooter to follow a target, but … More Riding a Scooter in Unity with VRoid Characters
Some expressions involve changing the face structure (a smile is created by a blend shape) while others involve changing the texture of the face (like blushing). The following describes my current plans to fade between textures for blushing and other expressions that work by changing the texture of a material. Multiple Textures In order to … More Animating VRoid Facial Texture Changes in Unity
I recently shared a blog post on a Unity script I am experimenting with to add ARKit compatible expressions to VRoid characters. Of course the day after, another tool became available that could have saved me quite a bit of hair pulling! Lol! I thought I would write up my brief experience with Hana_Tool and … More Changing Facial Expressions (part 3)
I have described challenges in animating facial expressions in a previous post. Facial expressions are based on “blend shapes” to adjust the shape of the face (e.g. move eye brows lower to indicate anger). Animating hand positions is different as it relates to moving bones rather than blend shapes. There are two ways to animate … More Animating Hand Poses in Unity
I previously wrote a post on Changing Facial Expressions where I went through the basics of how to control facial expressions in Unity. Since then I have made some progress in terms of adding additional blend shapes and based on that, I think I have finalized how I will do facial expressions for characters. I … More Changing Facial Expressions (part 2)
Extra Ordinary, the Series 