Basic Player Facial Animations

[Cheeseness]

People are moving ahead with facial animation, so it's better to push this out into its own issue rather than cluttering up #3.

To start with, we're looking for:

• Happy reaction face
• Angry reaction face
• Neutral face

[ChrAfonso]

Good idea, thanks for creating the issue! As there are different possibilities to implement these, I'd like to do a quick brain dump of my thoughts on these so far (mostly theoretical as for now - Some of this I already wrote in the other related issues, I hope it's not too redundant :))

• Blend shapes: using a neutral starting face and blend shapes "Happy" and "Angry", we can dynamically blend between them via script or animations, or in the simplest case just set them to 0 or 100 for instant switching. The Brad head (bradgolf7) currently in the Assets folder already has the "Happy" face available, which can be manipulated via the Inspector GUI or by adding a script using GetComponent(SkinnedMeshRenderer).SetBlendShapeWeight(0, value);
  Video of this in action: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jXUVdGHgh2U
• Textures: Alternatively, we could use three textures and swap them out according to the current player state. These would be easier to create and modify, but I don't know how transitions/animations between face could be done (animated textures?).

In both cases, a standardized naming scheme should be in place to make this independent of the current character/head model used - "Neutral", "Happy", and "Angry" seem to be the obvious labels ;).

Some specific caveats I encountered with blend shapes created in Blender:

• Before creating shapes, all mesh modifiers (mirror etc.) have to be applied, or the shapes will not be exported. And Blender won't apply modifiers when there already are shapes present - so all shapes created before applying the modifiers can't be used and have to be redone.
• The "inactive"--"fully active" range in Blender is [0..1], but after importing in Unity, it's mapped to [0..100], despite the Unity docs stating: "At weight 0 BlendShape has no influence, at weight 1 BlendShape is fully active"

[ChrAfonso]

Regarding the current state in the repo: The script "FaceState.cs" in Assets/scripts/animation can be dragged onto the "Head" gameobject (currently a subobject of the "BradHead" prefab in Assets/characters) and then blendshapes set from any script attached to the player gameobject via GameObject.Find("Head").SetFaceExpression("Happy"); etc.