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Test Subject
Original Poster
#1 Old 24th May 2019 at 11:45 PM Last edited by LoganWorm : 25th May 2019 at 12:27 AM.
Default How Can I: UV map my facial expressions to a custom game animation
Hello ModTheSims!

I admit that my request may be ambitious, but I really want to accomplish this. I am currently researching how I might be able to take a video of my own face and map my expressions onto a Sim in an animation program and transplant my expressions onto an in-game Sim via a custom game animation. I have been unable to find any tools specific to doing so. Ideally, I would find a method to do this repeatedly.

I am limited in my experience with animation modding, although I created one custom animation through Blender some time ago.

I would prefer to use The Sims 3 for this purpose, but if anyone experienced suggests that one of the other sims games is easier to attain, I am willing to use a different game.

Edit: If there is a process other than UVing that I am not aware of, feel free to mention any possible method!
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Mad Poster
#2 Old 25th May 2019 at 12:18 AM
Only way I see you doing that is by mapping the reference points on your face onto a flat plane (since you're talking UVs), unwrapping the joints on the Sim rig's face onto an identical flat plane, manually lining up each relevant joint to your own facial expression through a pretty cumbersome amount of manual work, and then mapping the joints back onto the rig's actual geometry. But that's only useful if you want to work two-dimensionally and I don't know if you can actually map a group of joints in 3d space onto a flat surface and back, the same way you can unwrap geometry onto a 2d canvas, draw on it, and project it back on.

It's an interesting idea that I'm not actually qualified to speculate on but going in blind, I'd say you'd need a 3-camera setup with even studio lighting and a means of stitching together the footage of your face. Rather than turning a Sim's face into a pancake and then glueing the pancake back on their skull, it might be easier to actually map the stitched footage (which would theoretically look like a Sim's head texture) onto the rig and trace it that way. Not an elegant way to do it and I'm sure there's pieces of software that'll do 90% of the work for you (if you're open to painting brightly coloured dots all over your face) but that's even further outside my increasingly fractured field of expertise.

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Virtual gardener
staff: administrator
#3 Old 25th May 2019 at 3:04 PM
Basically what Pi said

I'm a little confused though what UV mapping has to do with it but I know a few people who've done this. And they actually used their kinect sensor thingy to animate their body movements and implemented this into the sims 3. If you know how to do custom sims 3 animations then you're already a long way ahead, because you need a way to know how to save an animation

this is a great body mocap tutorial. not sure if it works for facial things but its practically the same way of doing things: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UPZtS5LVvw
Mad Poster
#4 Old 25th May 2019 at 3:33 PM
Is there any documentation on mocapping and TS3? I know Kinects are great for stuff like this but capturing motion data is one thing and actually applying it to a Sim rig is another thing. If it's anything short of tedious and complicated I'd personally be interested in getting a Kinect setup and experimenting with this.

Edit: there's quite a lot of tutorials and practical examples of mocapping to be found on YouTube and they do in fact all use Blender.

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Test Subject
Original Poster
#5 Old 25th May 2019 at 4:30 PM
Quote: Originally posted by Lyralei
Basically what Pi said

I'm a little confused though what UV mapping has to do with it but I know a few people who've done this. And they actually used their kinect sensor thingy to animate their body movements and implemented this into the sims 3. If you know how to do custom sims 3 animations then you're already a long way ahead, because you need a way to know how to save an animation

this is a great body mocap tutorial. not sure if it works for facial things but its practically the same way of doing things: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1UPZtS5LVvw


Okay this is a really cool concept! Do you think it is difficult to take your rig and apply it to the game's rig for animations? I know you said they used this to animate body movements, but the kinect tutorial also had a bunch of face-tracking as well. Would I have to use a similarly as complicated a process as Pi has already mentioned by going this route?

Someone else I asked seems to think that using video textures is the method to use for the game if the game reads video textures. I am not sure quite what this means, but if this sparks any ideas I thought I would mention it.

I appreciate all of the help so far!
Mad Poster
#6 Old 25th May 2019 at 4:57 PM
The game doesn't support animated textures in any way - and there's not much reason to, either.

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