Thanks for your ideas Joe. I'd prefer to steer clear of boned facial animation at the moment as it's quite tricky to setup and animate but I wouldn't rule it out for future characters. What i'm trying to do has already been seen in this Half Life 2 example movie showing facial animation, it's well worth checking out and may give some Blitzer's inspiration: http://www.ausgamers.com/files/details/html/8064
I had considered using an MD2 head with my morph targets on every consecutive frame, my only gripe with that method is I wanted to use sswift's shadow system on my characters and I believe that you can't cast shadows from MD2's.
So I guess direct manipulation of the vertices would be the way to go, i'll have to ask some questions on the Lightwave forums to see if I can spit out a text file from a morphmap of an object. This may lead to some cool new tools for Lightwave/Blitz3D users :-)
Only problem I may have is that i've read in these forums it may not be possible to manipulate the verticies via morphs on a character that is already being deformed by bones. Can anyone confirm this?
I had considered using an MD2 head with my morph targets on every consecutive frame, my only gripe with that method is I wanted to use sswift's shadow system on my characters and I believe that you can't cast shadows from MD2's.
So I guess direct manipulation of the vertices would be the way to go, i'll have to ask some questions on the Lightwave forums to see if I can spit out a text file from a morphmap of an object. This may lead to some cool new tools for Lightwave/Blitz3D users :-)
Only problem I may have is that i've read in these forums it may not be possible to manipulate the verticies via morphs on a character that is already being deformed by bones. Can anyone confirm this?