Sonic Movie Style Character Development - Dynamic 2D UV Eye Tracking via Blueprint
23Slowly getting back to work on personal projects. In the interim I had a hard drive unfortunately fail and lost the entire Bunnie Rabbot project file. Lost my shaders completely and the current model doesnt have physics bodies re-implemented. Still had the source files on another drive so at least I have the character model back in. Here I have recreated a character blueprint and implemented a system where Character A can look at Character B based on the target character's specific socket/bone names (e.g. the head, some body part etc).
With variables I have used some Find Look at Rotation nodes pinned internally to their heads to make/get vectors and send the Yaw and Pitch of said vectors over to some UV material offset to properly get the Pupils of these Bunnie Bots eyes moving around without any issues regarding body position or character body animation. Previously I had an overcomplicated really jank way of implementing it that caused quite a bit of derp/Schmebulock on certain angles.
Bunnie was created in a kind of hack work flow to make use of CC4s facial rigging (I cant rig or animate just a modeler texturer). But CC4 is made for humanoid models with normal round 3D eyes, not flat eyes which need 2D UV animation. Additionally CC4 does not allow you to key frame UVs so its impossible to really get 2D eyes made within that software.
Happy enough with how refined the results are as these characters can now be up or down, side by side, or even behind each other and will still maintain a more comfortable constant direction of focus (or last point of focus) so that when I finally get to animating the next short I will not have to worry about eye contact. The blueprint also has a switch to have a character look at a generic movable prop/static mesh if needed. Ill probably upload the setup to gumroad or art station later for those interested (on a UE5 Quinn not on this CC4 Bunnie which cannot be distributed).
Next I will be trying my luck at developing a real time Shadow character model.
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