Hello I am looking to animate my characters’ faces like in this example: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3UQQltMCcI

As you can see the faces are not modeled but instead they are some sort of animated texture that allows to switch between different facial expressions at a given point in time.

I tried with a Blend Colors node and it works great but it does not read my texture’s transparency channel (I am using a TGA file with transparency).

Any suggestions on how to achieve this effect will be highly appreciated.

Thanks!

TGA’s don’t support transparency - but you can save an alpha channel in the TGA image to be used as a transparency mask. In Maya, you could use that alpha channel to drive transparency in your shader - or simply use a file format that does support transparency, like .tif or .png

n8skow [FA]

I tried with Tiffs too but still haven’t been able to figure out a way to emulate facial expressions like in the example I submitted.
My question is not so much about transparency issues as it is about how to set up facial expressions like in the example I provided in my original post.
Any suggestions?

Thanks.

You’d need to create a small 2d animation ahead of time of the face, and then enable the ‘use image sequence’ button on the attribute editor when you connect your texture map to your shader.

n8skow [FA]

	Attachment