In the last post i talked a little about understanding scripts for Convai so that we can customize any scripts like blinking eyes, head rotation and other dynamic expressions and procedural actions.
We did manage to make the head (Natan's Blender asset) blink but in our last meeting we weren't able to show the full potential of what we wanted to achieve, we were able to blink the head at random intervals and the script was written in such a way that the blink has a percentage of change to blink. The Feedback given for this was the blink is fine but it is not natural and not exactly true to the thinking process of "behavioural npc" which could use some dynamic eye expressions like tired, sleepy, excited, happy, etc. that could be a part of the eye expressions and blinking.
Based on the feedback and some discussion time we chose to look into different core aspects of Unity and utilize some of the already know packages and plugins. My specific task was to try out animation rigging this week and try to make the blinking and eye expressions in the coming weeks.
After researching a little into the animation rigging and the process behind it, I have managed to make a head tracking skeleton head using animation rigging.
I specifically chose a skeleton for my first experiment because my opinion with making animation rigging for skeletons is that it might not need a blinking animation unless we were making a cartoon character.
The red sphere on the left is what the skeleton is seeing and based on the movement of the ball/sphere its moving its head. The sphere is set as the target over here. I have used a multi-aim constraint for this type of animation rigging.
The constraints above shows you that the constraint object is set to "head" and the sphere named "target" is set as the source object. The settings can be changed in constraint axes if you want to constraint the head rotation at any axis.
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