Direct link
Check it out online here:
Animated Facial Textures in Maya and Unity - Full Document
You can check my further notes on the subject here:
More on Animated Facial Textures
Essentially, my goal was to create a texture-driven facial animation system that worked in both Maya and Unity. Making one in Maya is very simple, but I found very little on getting it to work in Unity, and nothing about getting it to export from Maya.
To give a bit of a background, for FIEA, one of our assignments was to document or write a tutorial about something we learned or wanted to learn. I took this opportunity to pick up Unity, and solve a possible problem for a game I will be working on soon, and a problem I'd been curious about since when I was working on Intrepid.
I came up with a solution using joint animation that can be baked out of Maya and used in Unity. The Maya portion gave me some practice with Maya Expressions, which is great considering I want to rig up the rest of the character soon. And the Unity portion gave me a chance to learn Unity, and also learn some C#. C# wasn't too difficult to pick up, having studied C and Java in the past; the code to get it all working can pretty much be copy-pasted from the document.
Download the pdf from the link above. It should be very accessible - it breaks it down really small to start; getting it in engine, and how the math of the expressions and the image offset method will work. And in sections 4 and 5, it gets to the meat of the whole operation.
If anyone has any questions on how it works, or why I did something; or any comments on how I can improve this method, I'd love to hear it. Send me an email, or drop me a message here.
