Hey Everyone! We have a new video that covers how to Animate Object Visibility using Geometry Nodes here: ruclips.net/video/-ONw053FlV0/видео.html It makes Method 3 significantly easier, and you might find it helpful! Thanks for watching!
Thank you allot for making this video! I am currently using your node setups to animate my faces as well. However, when the face textures in the first method have an alpha value, said alpha is shown as black in the end result. Can you please come up with a solution for that as well? So that it cuts the alpha of each individual face correctly?
This tutorial needs to be an essential tutorial for all animators and anime creators that use Blender. This will help me a lot, because I am doing an animation and the character´s eyelid are just an image, it can´t have a separated geometry from the eyes geometry. I found this tutorial randomly and it saves my animation! It was destiny lol
i commented this on the last video but i want to let everyone reading these comments to know just how truly powerful the method 1 texture switching setup is, not just for animation but blender in general. Say you are constructing a shader and want to switch between multiple presets or options on the fly. There is no simple way to do this within blender but if you construct the method 1 node group you can easily apply that logic to any situation. I now have several shaders using multiple of these groups in various situations, allowing me to have much more versatility built right in. The robustness of such a simple concept is incredible, thank you again for your help !
I've been working with Pokémon models for over 6 years, and I never realized that such a convenient keyframing option like Method 2 existed for animating eye/mouth textures. Thank you so much for not only bringing this to my attention, but for sharing it with the rest of the world. I'm sure it will come in handy for all of us out there who wish to optimize their model setups for animations. :)
FINALLY, a 2D face rig tutorial that works for me!!! I pretty much stopped when the part came to add it to the rig, but I can still key it nonetheless!!! This helped me so much with changing the expressions on my ripped Katamari cousin rigs, thank you!!
This is by far one of the most stylish and useful pipeline time savers I ever found. It's so simple and clean I don't know why I never though of researching for this before... Amazing Tutorial!
This may be a year old, but it had EXACTALLY what I needed. I am working on a gift for a friend (a little dog loaf of their character) and I didn't want to get too complex with the face of it. I remembered that one rig I downloaded and messed around with had the eyes not be 3d objects and just a texture that could be shifted and moved around, which led my mind to remember that other blender animators had made roughly what is shown here. Though they made them they didn't show how they did it. A rabbit hole of looking later and I run into this updated video with all the parts I was hoping for! Thank you and whatever crew you have helping you!
This video is super helpful, Im designing a toon style character for a friend and tying the 2d textures to bones helps so much. Especially setting up pose libraries. Now that it is tied to bones I can just follow my normal workflow like before instead of messing with values and trying to pose all at the same time
If you end up with a grayscale texture, be sure to change the setting on the mix node from "Float" (what it was by default for me) to "Color" It took me way longer than it should have for me to figure this out. I'm using Blender 3.4.1 for reference
Now that's what i'm looking for :D I tried to add a driver on the animate texture but it is almost not working for me until it works because of this tutorial ^^ thank you so much
Thank you very much! We used the Sonic model from Super Smash Bros Ultimate! You can find it here: www.models-resource.com/nintendo_switch/supersmashbrosultimate/model/38496/ Thanks for watching!
Been toying around with this One Texture-Multiple Poses method, and may have found a method to do it with a re-usable node, so you can just enter the picture, enter how many frames there are on the x- and y-axis, and go from there. The starting point is an Image Texture with a simple mapping node and a coordinate node connected by the UVs, all pretty standard. You do need to have your UV's set up so you're seeing one frame off your grid, so this is more appropriate if you're drawing it from scratch: just duplicate the rectangles around each drawing and snap them together to expand the grid. For already existing grids, I'm assuming this works, too, but not sure how to set it up aside from minding your UV layout. Starting from that base setup, add a 'Settings/Dimensions' node, which is a Vector Math:Multiply node with all 1s up top and your dimensions (say, 3 x and 2 y) at the bottom. There might be a simpler way, you just need a single vector for that one, but that's what popped up first. Anyway, run that through the bottom of a Vector Math:Divide node which has all 1s at the top. Run that through the Scale of the Mapping node. Then add the animating node, which is a Vector Math:Snap node with increment set to 1. The increment is what lets you navigate from one frame to the other in a 'snappy' fashion, so you don't see the texture moving in between, gives it that Flash animation feel. The Vector in this node is what'll be animated, and set up with drivers. Add a Vector Math:Multiply node, and connect this animating node to the Divide node from before. The output of this last Multiply node goes into the Location of the Mapping node. The end result is a single shader that can be set to accomodate a 3 by 3, 2 by 6, whatever sprite sheet grid, without further setting up aside from linking the image, tweaking numbers and setting up drivers. Not sure if this has been posted elsewhere already, pretty sure I'm not the first person to think of this, but it seems like a useful method to mention anyway. Haven't fully tested it yet, so there may be issues, but it's functional so far, and might save some time in the long run.
Hey! I loved your tutorial and I love your work! But is there a way to make the rig like instead of up in down I’d be like be able too move around freely example: [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] [] Instead of [] [] [] [] [] The squares would be the different face options and I don’t really know how to explain it but it’s just that my character has a lot of different faces so maybe instead of an arrow it’s just like a dot that could move around the squares? If u don’t understand then okay I know its difficult to understand what I’m tryna say but if you do I’d really appreciate help on this! Thanks anyways!
I couldn't get the previous version of this to work, so now I'm trying this video and my textures aren't showing up when I put them in the mixed node. My eyes are round objects and I made an open, half-closed and closed texture for them, but when I import them and put them in the mixer (around 0:56 ) , the only thing the slider is doing is changing the eye a white and slightly grayer white, with no pupil or eyelid to be found.
Keyframe the location of the selector bone in order to animate texture swaps! We don't currently have a tutorial covering keyframing in depth, however we touch on it during our Paper Mario Tutorial here: ruclips.net/video/-3ZXUknOCTA/видео.html Let me know if this helps! Thank you for watching 😄
hey awesome video! pro tip from not a pro. if you have node wrangler enabled, you can just select all your image nodes, press Ctrl + Alt + Numpad 0 to auto Mix all your selected nodes! also work with other mix types like press * for multiply, etc. so handy and saves a few seconds. cheers!
These methods all looks amazing! I was wondering if there is possibly anyway to make method 1 (or any of these really) work outside of Blender, such as maybe with Unity. I was thinking of maybe trying to see if there's a way to make this stuff work with shape keys, but I'm unsure myself.
I've looked at Unreal a bit, and I feel like you could make something similar in there. I haven't had a chance to look at Unity yet, so I'm unsure. As far as how to set it all up, I'm still in the process of trying to learn Unreal. So...I'm not much help outside of blender 😅 If I figure it out, I'll definitely make a video on it! Thank you for watching 😄
Amazing video! Do you think any of these methods could be adapted to work if you've got all of your expressions on the same texture as the rest of the model like in classic games, or do you think sorting that out is a whole other can of worms?
8:30 What I didn't understand is that when multiplying by -7 inside the node group, how the values of the threshold still exceed 1 or 2, etc. ty for video so appreciated♥
idk jack about blender, those little node square things scare the crap out of me. a friend of mine made me a model (since idk jack about blender), and i decided i wanted to add expressions to it. this tutorial was really intimidating but worked wonderfully :D
That could possibly mean that you've duplicated your Bones in Object mode instead of Edit mode. Which would be making multiple armatures, instead of bones within an armature. Check your outliner in the top right and see if you have multiple armatures! Let me know if this helps 😄
@@TheObservatoryShow that was exactly right .and i made relations by the list but the string connection is not shown in viewport and i think there is another problem
@@shabrangadmin4202 Select all of your bones, hit Ctrl+J to join them together, then redo the Parenting in the Bone Relations if you need to! Let me know if this solves anything!
Thats so amazing! Finaly I found that knoledge! Thanks so much! I´m searching for how to do that on Unity, but the videos I find are super over complicated and my mind shuts down before I understand. Any possibility you do this take on Unity?
although makes me wonder if this is incorperable into vrchat which is something id want, from what i know vrchat uses shape keys so ugh, i dont wanna use planes with transparent textures either, just think itd look wrong
@@TheObservatoryShow essentially vrchat runs on unity, facial animations etc run on animations which use shape keys or bones, so im pretty sure itd have to run on shape/blend keys
@@TheObservatoryShow thank you,your amazing=) May I ask for the layers, should I draw them in an app like photoshop,paint tool sai or clip studio and cut them to meet the face? may I ask if you could do a tutorial on that if possible?
You can definitely make them in whichever image editing program you're most comfortable with! Blender's texture paint also works as well. We can for sure do a tutorial on something like this. Once we're done modelling Marnie, we're going to cover how to create textures(specifically Marnie's eyes) using nodes in Blender, which you might find handy!
Thanks for sharing. If I want to make animation for mouth, should I repeat all the the same step? Let say I want to use the same texture to another character, can I reuse the already made texture?
Hi! Thanks for the tutorial :) Is there anyway I can do method one but with an alpha texture? Because in my character I'm using the expressions on a duplicated face in the mesh...
Hi great video, In first method you have not transparent expressions in case if I want to change skin tone it will look weird... Is there any royalty free mouth shape you used or you made yourself having tutorial here?
So say I do method 1 and I have each integer change a mouth texture. 1 is Smile, 2 is Frown, and 3 is AH, etc. Is it possible to use whatever in Blender that is keyable to select each of these values but as names instead? In Maya, I would've made a dropped down attribute that can select through a list of names. I could select Frown, and it would change to that second value. Changing the mouth texture to Frown as it's assigned to 2. I like that you showed that we can use an arrow and slide through different names or images, but I'm curious to know if it's possible to do something like that, not in the viewport. One way I tried was using the UV Project modifier, and creating pose shapes for the bone. Each pose was named Smile, Frown, etc. And I would key on those. But I have a bone flying all over the face to get those poses. I don't want that.
Its very possible that the geometry node system might be able to do something like this. At best it'd probably be a weird workaround that'd cause people to rage. However I love weird workarounds, so I'll see if I can make it work! Otherwise I'm sure you could use a script to make it work.
There are a couple ways you could go about it. You could put the textures with alpha on planes slightly in front of your face! You could also set it up like the Paper Mario example, except add a mix node before the color input of the BSDF shader. Use the alpha output of the node group as the factor, and connect your head texture to the other color input of the node group. Let me know if this helps!
I got textures that use the Alpha to make the background of the image opaque. When I try using this tutorial it only works for one image at a time due the one currently showing needing to have it's Alpha of the Image linked to the Alpha of the Principled BSDF. Is there a way to make an image set like this work? Or do I have to give it a background the same colour as the skin of my character? If so, how do I make an image that makes that match up perfectly with the character?
I have an issue. around 6:44 you add a bone to the shaders. But when ever I do this the bone feature doesn't even show up. no matter what form of body part i select it doesn't show up.
Hello! Super informative video with a metric _ton_ of applications. -Though whatever reason though, I can't seem to get the texture to change beyond the second texture option. It _does_ change correctly after passing the first Greater Than threshold (at 1.000,) then just like.. refuses to change after passing the second Greater Than threshold (at 2.000.) I opened a fresh project and tried it again with simpler materials and set up on a cube, and it still doesn't work. Which doesn't make any sense, logically speaking it should work, it is so straight forward. I tried it on multiple fresh blender versions (2.92 and 2.93) and no dice. Not sure what I could possibly be doing wrong, I'm confident I'm following your setup exactly. I feel crazy. lol -Is it possible there's some setting somewhere I have to enable, or something else bugging it out? Like I said it works when switching between 0.000 and 1.000, ..but nothing above that, ..which is so odd. One thing I will say that does appear different are your "image files," as they appear as quote "base color" instead of the file name. Don't think that would affect anything. Even still I tried with simple rgb color values, and still the problem remains the same; it doesn't advance past the second texture/color option. Thanks in advance for any help!
This does sound odd, one possible thing is you could have Clamp enabled on your greater than nodes. Other than that though, if you'd like to Email us a couple screenshots of your node setup or even your .blend file, it'd help us troubleshoot potential issues!
@@TheObservatoryShow -Sorry, I figured it out! I am, suuper dumb. lol What happened was I had each Greater Than node output value plugging into the _next_ Greater Than node input (top,) when I was supposed to have the _Add Node_ output plugged directly into each Greater Than input (top.) Don't know how I got that so confused, wow. Thanks though for that lightning quick response!
this worked for making the eyes transparent which was my biggest problem, but now the texture stretches? I've tried taking a texture coordinate and mapping node to fix it but it doesn't work. I'm gonna try one more thing and hope it works!
Hi, i've been learning method 2 and yeah it's best method for my model so far. Thanks ! 😁 But i have a problem here, when i keyframing using I (insert keyframe on mapping nodes). The keyframe is showing in the Dopesheet but it didn't show up in Action Editor. Do you have any idea why ? I've tried to mess anything but still zero
Material keyframes will show up in the dopesheet, NLA editor and even the graph editor. However they don't show up in the Action editor. If you use the driver setup, the selector bone should show up in the action editor. There is a way to get them to show up, but it involves changing data properties which I wouldn't recommend, and could potentially mess up some other stuff!
@@TheObservatoryShow i see.. thought i did wrong in the first place. Oh and 1 more bro, my mapping nodes couldn't connected with combine xyz node because there is no connector in Location in mapping node (im using Blender 2.8, im sorry). Is there any other way to connect combine xyz node and mapping ? ✌😂
Its possible to use a series of Mapping nodes in place of the Combine XYZ nodes! Then just combine them all with Mix nodes like you would've the XYZ node. Let me know if this works, I don't currently have access to 2.8, but In my head it sounds like it would work! 😁
this video is amazing! helped so much thank you! was wondering tho if anyone has the same issue as me I wanted to do this so I can add it too an unreal project im doing but for my main charactar but am pretty new to everything so sorry if it seems like a stupid question but exporting FBX doesn't export texture would need to UV, bake then export seperetly then animating just exports the skeleton mesh but say I wanna do a Idle pose and the eyes sway then look left then right would the texture after baking and exporting animate as well? any help would be amazing
Great tutorial! though I'm running into a problem with method 2 in that when I try to use the mapping node, the UVs wont move. I'm a beginner to all of this so I wouldn't be surprised if I'm missing something here
There's quite a few things that could be going on! Make sure its the Texture coordinates UV socket connected to the Mapping nodes vector input. Also make sure that your working on your active eye texture in the Shader editor. These would be the most simple answers, let me know if they help! Thanks for watching!
@@TheObservatoryShow thx for the advice! turns out I forgot to put it into viewport shading, rookie mistake I know. now I'm experimenting ways to turn these into shape keys for unity and VRChat
Hello! Awesome tutorial as always! I got a question, when I link the rig it into another blend file . . . the rig works and changes the texture but the changes doesn't render? Is it complicated to link and override materials with drivers?
I haven't had a chance to use library overrides much yet, so I'm not entirely sure what could all be going on. As far as I know it hasn't been fully implemented yet, so that might be why it's not working! When I get a chance I'll look into it!
@@TheObservatoryShow True true, after a lot of googling. Hope someone's pointed it out to the Blender devs. But for now I just append my rigs and your drivers work perfectly.
Hi. Сool tutorial. I am new to blender. I saw this video because I myself was just trying to learn how to switch textures. only it turned out differently for me. I inserted a sequence in the image texture and switched it with an offset. I wanted to know if it can be used like that? or there will be advantages with a mix shader and many image texture nodes?
That's one of the more common ways I've seen it done, it definitely works! The only disadvantage is there is no way to turn off the auto animation of the Image sequence, so you've got to do a lot of messing around with the offset and interpolation! However we're actually working on a video to help solve this issue, which should be out soon hopefully 😆 Thanks for watching!
In edit mode you select the faces that encompass where the eye texture will lay> Hit U to Unwrap them > Then line the UVs up with the eye texture. We cover this process in Episode 8 of Mario in detail: ruclips.net/video/koZYMOO1XPQ/видео.html Let me know if this helps!
@@TheObservatoryShow I have problem where when i make the seam for the eye area, it mess the the seams for the texture and mess up the overall model textures. I was wondering if there a way for me to get around this with out mess up my textures.
Under Object Data properties you can add an additional UV Map and unwrap the eye faces to the new UV map. Use a UV map node in your eye texture, then select the eyes UV map on the UV map node and connect the output of that node to the vector input of your eye image texture. Let me know if this is confusing, or helps at all. It's definitely a potential topic for a future video!
@@TheObservatoryShow Thank you , but it there a way for me to get rid of the of parts of the model because once I made the new UV map and and seam up the eye part to unwrap, once i did it the eye section is there but the other parts of the model is under it. Wondering if there is a way to solve that
Is there actual object geometry under the new eye UV, or textures? I'm having difficulty picturing what you're explaining without seeing it, if you want you can Email us a screenshot or a .blend file and we can take a look at it!
You can use a separate object, but they can also be part of the head. You just need to plan out your UVs accordingly, or use multiple UV maps! The key is that the eyes have a separate material from the face. Let me know if this helps. Thank you for watching!
When using method one, are you able to cross fade between animations or will that cause the face texture to cycle between the intermediate faces as you change from one animation to another?
Awesome tutorial this really helped out! However, I've run into a problem where the texture would turn pink after using more than 8 mix nodes( method 1 ). Do you have any tips on fixing that? (using eevee)
I've recently found out that Eevee has a texture limit per material of 24! I'm not sure the scope of your project, but there are a couple workarounds that may be helpful. You can incorporate method 3 and have multiple fully(capped) textured objects, that you switch between for your different poses. Another user suggested using an Image Sequence Node. You have to name your textures ending with sequential numbers, and it'll cycle through the images with the Timeline. You have to keyframe the Offset field of the Image Sequence Node, using linear interpolation and constant interpolation when needed. Let me know if this helps!
ok so i am using some mouths texture with a transparent background, i did what i had to do and it work but not entierly, at first i could not see the black line of the mouth, so i did the thing for transparency, now i can completly see the mouth but the background is still black .
i went into the material setting and change the blend mode, it's finally transparent but the skin color is darker around the mouth, it's obviously not the shadow, it's so annoying everytime i find a solution, another problem appears.
Troubleshooting can be a process! Without seeing it, it's hard to visualize/figure out what could be happening. If you're comfortable with it, you can Email us your .Blend file and I'll take a look at it! If you decide to send it, since its dealing with textures you need to pack those into your file first. To do that >File >External Data >Select Automatically Pack into .Blend. Let me know! Thank you for watching 😀
thankyou, im trying todo 2d animation in blender and my character has different body images and im trying to turn off and on different images, i think this will do it. tho idk how to key frame the value of the nodes
Keyframing is pretty simple, with the timeline/dopesheet/action editor/etc open, navigate to the frame of choice, and with your mouse hovering over the node value, hit "I" to add a keyframe to that frame.
You could set it up so that the materials become transparent, but the better option would be method 3 for animating visibility of objects! You can setup the selection Interface the same way as method 1 and 2 for method 3 as well. Let me know if this answers your question! Thank you for watching.
Hey Everyone! We have a new video that covers how to Animate Object Visibility using Geometry Nodes here: ruclips.net/video/-ONw053FlV0/видео.html It makes Method 3 significantly easier, and you might find it helpful! Thanks for watching!
Thank you allot for making this video! I am currently using your node setups to animate my faces as well. However, when the face textures in the first method have an alpha value, said alpha is shown as black in the end result. Can you please come up with a solution for that as well? So that it cuts the alpha of each individual face correctly?
This tutorial needs to be an essential tutorial for all animators and anime creators that use Blender. This will help me a lot, because I am doing an animation and the character´s eyelid are just an image, it can´t have a separated geometry from the eyes geometry. I found this tutorial randomly and it saves my animation! It was destiny lol
I'm glad you found it helpful! Thank you very much for watching 😄
i commented this on the last video but i want to let everyone reading these comments to know just how truly powerful the method 1 texture switching setup is, not just for animation but blender in general. Say you are constructing a shader and want to switch between multiple presets or options on the fly. There is no simple way to do this within blender but if you construct the method 1 node group you can easily apply that logic to any situation. I now have several shaders using multiple of these groups in various situations, allowing me to have much more versatility built right in. The robustness of such a simple concept is incredible, thank you again for your help !
😄 I'm glad you found it useful! There are a ton of cool ways to utilize these systems! Thank you very much for watching!
It also makes key-framing several materials easier!
I've been working with Pokémon models for over 6 years, and I never realized that such a convenient keyframing option like Method 2 existed for animating eye/mouth textures. Thank you so much for not only bringing this to my attention, but for sharing it with the rest of the world. I'm sure it will come in handy for all of us out there who wish to optimize their model setups for animations. :)
I hope it helps make creating things easier! Thank you for watching 😁
FINALLY, a 2D face rig tutorial that works for me!!! I pretty much stopped when the part came to add it to the rig, but I can still key it nonetheless!!! This helped me so much with changing the expressions on my ripped Katamari cousin rigs, thank you!!
I'm glad you found it useful! Thank you very much for watching!
This is by far one of the most stylish and useful pipeline time savers I ever found. It's so simple and clean I don't know why I never though of researching for this before...
Amazing Tutorial!
Thank you very much! I'm glad you found it useful! Thank you for watching 😄
This may be a year old, but it had EXACTALLY what I needed. I am working on a gift for a friend (a little dog loaf of their character) and I didn't want to get too complex with the face of it. I remembered that one rig I downloaded and messed around with had the eyes not be 3d objects and just a texture that could be shifted and moved around, which led my mind to remember that other blender animators had made roughly what is shown here. Though they made them they didn't show how they did it.
A rabbit hole of looking later and I run into this updated video with all the parts I was hoping for! Thank you and whatever crew you have helping you!
That's it! I officially love you. I finally had the time to watch this updated version, going to test method 1 today, thank you again!
I hope it goes well! Let me know if you have any questions!
This was amazing! Thank you, this video really deserves more attention
😃 Glad you like it! Thank you for watching!
This video is super helpful, Im designing a toon style character for a friend and tying the 2d textures to bones helps so much. Especially setting up pose libraries. Now that it is tied to bones I can just follow my normal workflow like before instead of messing with values and trying to pose all at the same time
I'm glad you found it useful! Thank you for watching 😁
This answered just about all the problems I’m currently having figuring out. Thanks so much for being so helpful!!
I'm glad it was helpful! Thank you for watching 😄
I'm so glad I found this channel!!!
Me too! Thank you for watching 😁
If you end up with a grayscale texture, be sure to change the setting on the mix node from "Float" (what it was by default for me) to "Color"
It took me way longer than it should have for me to figure this out. I'm using Blender 3.4.1 for reference
So to get sync with audio , will i have to animate only in constant interpolation mode ?
Man, thank you for this tutorial! Simple and right to the point and very informative.
Thanks for the tutorial! Hope you have a wonderful rest of the day and weekend.
Thank you very much! You too! 😃
Worked like a charm. Exactly what I was looking for.
Thank you.
I hope it was helpful! Thank you very much for watching 😁
Your tutorial was exactly what I needed and straight to the point. Thank you!
Thank you for watching!
I was looking for this just 3 days ago, thanks very much
I hope it helps! Thank you for watching 😀
Now that's what i'm looking for :D I tried to add a driver on the animate texture but it is almost not working for me until it works because of this tutorial ^^ thank you so much
Glad I could help! 😁 Thanks for watching!
wow man, i watched a lots of tutorials, and your video is the best. thanks.
Just made a very cool Steve Minecraft rig thanks to this tutorial, thanks for the great clean cut content friend! :D
Glad you found it useful! Thank you for watching 😄
So helpful! Thank you. Also sonic looks sooo good. :D
Thank you very much! We used the Sonic model from Super Smash Bros Ultimate! You can find it here: www.models-resource.com/nintendo_switch/supersmashbrosultimate/model/38496/ Thanks for watching!
Been toying around with this One Texture-Multiple Poses method, and may have found a method to do it with a re-usable node, so you can just enter the picture, enter how many frames there are on the x- and y-axis, and go from there. The starting point is an Image Texture with a simple mapping node and a coordinate node connected by the UVs, all pretty standard. You do need to have your UV's set up so you're seeing one frame off your grid, so this is more appropriate if you're drawing it from scratch: just duplicate the rectangles around each drawing and snap them together to expand the grid. For already existing grids, I'm assuming this works, too, but not sure how to set it up aside from minding your UV layout.
Starting from that base setup, add a 'Settings/Dimensions' node, which is a Vector Math:Multiply node with all 1s up top and your dimensions (say, 3 x and 2 y) at the bottom. There might be a simpler way, you just need a single vector for that one, but that's what popped up first. Anyway, run that through the bottom of a Vector Math:Divide node which has all 1s at the top. Run that through the Scale of the Mapping node. Then add the animating node, which is a Vector Math:Snap node with increment set to 1. The increment is what lets you navigate from one frame to the other in a 'snappy' fashion, so you don't see the texture moving in between, gives it that Flash animation feel. The Vector in this node is what'll be animated, and set up with drivers. Add a Vector Math:Multiply node, and connect this animating node to the Divide node from before. The output of this last Multiply node goes into the Location of the Mapping node.
The end result is a single shader that can be set to accomodate a 3 by 3, 2 by 6, whatever sprite sheet grid, without further setting up aside from linking the image, tweaking numbers and setting up drivers. Not sure if this has been posted elsewhere already, pretty sure I'm not the first person to think of this, but it seems like a useful method to mention anyway. Haven't fully tested it yet, so there may be issues, but it's functional so far, and might save some time in the long run.
3 amazing tutorials in 1 video.
You're very helpful.
Glad you found it useful! Thank you for watching 😄
Hey Everyone! Hope you're doing well! Let us know if you have any questions, comments, or suggestions!
Psst you forgot to add the link in the description. Thanks for the video, really useful as always!
😅 Thank you 😁
Hey! I loved your tutorial and I love your work! But is there a way to make the rig like instead of up in down I’d be like be able too move around freely example:
[] [] [] [] []
[] [] [] [] []
[] [] [] [] []
Instead of
[]
[]
[]
[]
[]
The squares would be the different face options and I don’t really know how to explain it but it’s just that my character has a lot of different faces so maybe instead of an arrow it’s just like a dot that could move around the squares? If u don’t understand then okay I know its difficult to understand what I’m tryna say but if you do I’d really appreciate help on this!
Thanks anyways!
your videos are so helpful and i love the bio you have for your channel lol!
Super Useful!!!
♥ Glad you found it useful!😄
God I love this channel!
😁 Thank you for watching ♥
I couldn't get the previous version of this to work, so now I'm trying this video and my textures aren't showing up when I put them in the mixed node. My eyes are round objects and I made an open, half-closed and closed texture for them, but when I import them and put them in the mixer (around 0:56 ) , the only thing the slider is doing is changing the eye a white and slightly grayer white, with no pupil or eyelid to be found.
Thank you so much! I've been looking for specifically this for a while!!
This answers my question from the last video. Great tutorial and a really great method for doing this! Zank you good sir~!
Amazing as always 👍
😄 Thanks for watching!
Great! This really helped with my models. Thank you!!
Glad to hear! 😁 Thank you for watching!
This tutorial is super-useful, thank you so much!
Glad it helped! Thank you for watching 😄
Brilliant Man
😊 Thank you very much! I hope it helps!
That was an awesome idea!
Subscribed 🙂
You're amazing! Thank you for these great tutorials!
Could you make a video about how to animate 2d eyes like sonic ones?
Definitely! I'll add it to the list!
Amazing technique! Thank you this was so helpful!
this helped me a lot
I'm glad to hear that! Thanks for watching 😄
Thank you so much teacher!! now i finally learned how to do this..hopefully i can put this on my animation and transfer this to unreal engine :)
I'm glad it was helpful! Thank you for watching!
Thank you!!! Exactly what I was looking for!
cool and amazing tutorial this give me easy to my college work :D
did you have tutorial to lock that textures as a keyframes?
Keyframe the location of the selector bone in order to animate texture swaps! We don't currently have a tutorial covering keyframing in depth, however we touch on it during our Paper Mario Tutorial here: ruclips.net/video/-3ZXUknOCTA/видео.html Let me know if this helps! Thank you for watching 😄
Super, thanks !! 👌😍
Hope it helps 😀Thanks for watching!
Thanks so much! I was having trouble changing expressions for my Pokemon animation!
love U man kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk thank you so much for this tutorial!
Thank you very much for watching!
hey awesome video! pro tip from not a pro. if you have node wrangler enabled, you can just select all your image nodes, press Ctrl + Alt + Numpad 0 to auto Mix all your selected nodes! also work with other mix types like press * for multiply, etc. so handy and saves a few seconds. cheers!
same with math nodes. Ctrl + Shift + > for greater than, + for add, etc
That's actually extreme handy, thank you for the tip! Thanks for watching 😁
Very helpful Thank you 😊
You’re welcome 😊 Thank you for watching!
I love this video
😁 Thank you for watching!
These methods all looks amazing! I was wondering if there is possibly anyway to make method 1 (or any of these really) work outside of Blender, such as maybe with Unity. I was thinking of maybe trying to see if there's a way to make this stuff work with shape keys, but I'm unsure myself.
I've looked at Unreal a bit, and I feel like you could make something similar in there. I haven't had a chance to look at Unity yet, so I'm unsure. As far as how to set it all up, I'm still in the process of trying to learn Unreal. So...I'm not much help outside of blender 😅 If I figure it out, I'll definitely make a video on it! Thank you for watching 😄
Hey man!!! It's amazing!!!! Woow!
THANK YOU SO MUCH :D
I hope it helps! Thanks for watching!
Amazing video! Do you think any of these methods could be adapted to work if you've got all of your expressions on the same texture as the rest of the model like in classic games, or do you think sorting that out is a whole other can of worms?
Please do a tutorial on how to make custom models with animatable textures like in the examples of their video!
Yes! That's definitely something I'd like to do at some point! Thank you for watching!
@@TheObservatoryShow I hope to see it soon!
8:30
What I didn't understand is that when multiplying by -7 inside the node group, how the values of the threshold still exceed 1 or 2, etc.
ty for video so appreciated♥
completely goated
😁 Thanks for watching!
excellent tutorial it helped me a lot thank you very much
idk jack about blender, those little node square things scare the crap out of me. a friend of mine made me a model (since idk jack about blender), and i decided i wanted to add expressions to it. this tutorial was really intimidating but worked wonderfully :D
thanks for the great tut . but i have problem with bone relation list at 12:00 .there is nothing in the list! i used crtl+p to parent but didn`t work.
That could possibly mean that you've duplicated your Bones in Object mode instead of Edit mode. Which would be making multiple armatures, instead of bones within an armature. Check your outliner in the top right and see if you have multiple armatures! Let me know if this helps 😄
@@TheObservatoryShow that was exactly right .and i made relations by the list but the string connection is not shown in viewport and i think there is another problem
@@shabrangadmin4202 Select all of your bones, hit Ctrl+J to join them together, then redo the Parenting in the Bone Relations if you need to! Let me know if this solves anything!
@@TheObservatoryShow please watch this video . sorry for my bad english
drive.google.com/file/d/1SN_3EL6hvDGx0jP__f1dSCwhFy_QL0si/view?usp=sharing
THANK YOU!!!
Thank you for watching 😀
Dope. Thans!
😎 Thank you for watching!
Thats so amazing! Finaly I found that knoledge! Thanks so much!
I´m searching for how to do that on Unity, but the videos I find are super over complicated and my mind shuts down before I understand.
Any possibility you do this take on Unity?
Very nice thanks
even better
although makes me wonder if this is incorperable into vrchat which is something id want, from what i know vrchat uses shape keys so ugh, i dont wanna use planes with transparent textures either, just think itd look wrong
I have very little experience when it comes to other engines, but I'll be sure to share the info if I ever figure anything out!
@@TheObservatoryShow essentially vrchat runs on unity, facial animations etc run on animations which use shape keys or bones, so im pretty sure itd have to run on shape/blend keys
thank you soo muchhhh
You're welcome! 😁 Thank you very much for watching!
@@TheObservatoryShow thank you,your amazing=) May I ask for the layers, should I draw them in an app like photoshop,paint tool sai or clip studio and cut them to meet the face? may I ask if you could do a tutorial on that if possible?
You can definitely make them in whichever image editing program you're most comfortable with! Blender's texture paint also works as well. We can for sure do a tutorial on something like this. Once we're done modelling Marnie, we're going to cover how to create textures(specifically Marnie's eyes) using nodes in Blender, which you might find handy!
@@TheObservatoryShow very grateful, thank youuu, your amazing=)
math =.= I have no aptitude for math, =.= I feel stupid. But I'm so grateful for teaching me how to do it, what a great tutorial, I'm so happy
I hope it helps! Thank you for watching 😄
nice work
Wow!
😄 Thanks for watching!
Thanks for sharing. If I want to make animation for mouth, should I repeat all the the same step? Let say I want to use the same texture to another character, can I reuse the already made texture?
Thank you. a lot.
You're welcome 😁 Thank you for watching!
@@TheObservatoryShow :>
Hi! Thanks for the tutorial :)
Is there anyway I can do method one but with an alpha texture? Because in my character I'm using the expressions on a duplicated face in the mesh...
Hi great video, In first method you have not transparent expressions in case if I want to change skin tone it will look weird... Is there any royalty free mouth shape you used or you made yourself having tutorial here?
So say I do method 1 and I have each integer change a mouth texture. 1 is Smile, 2 is Frown, and 3 is AH, etc. Is it possible to use whatever in Blender that is keyable to select each of these values but as names instead? In Maya, I would've made a dropped down attribute that can select through a list of names. I could select Frown, and it would change to that second value. Changing the mouth texture to Frown as it's assigned to 2. I like that you showed that we can use an arrow and slide through different names or images, but I'm curious to know if it's possible to do something like that, not in the viewport. One way I tried was using the UV Project modifier, and creating pose shapes for the bone. Each pose was named Smile, Frown, etc. And I would key on those. But I have a bone flying all over the face to get those poses. I don't want that.
Its very possible that the geometry node system might be able to do something like this. At best it'd probably be a weird workaround that'd cause people to rage. However I love weird workarounds, so I'll see if I can make it work! Otherwise I'm sure you could use a script to make it work.
How did you get the face textures to be transparent without having to plug in the image texture to the BSDF alpha?
if not, is there a simpler way to do Method 1 with alpha?
There are a couple ways you could go about it. You could put the textures with alpha on planes slightly in front of your face! You could also set it up like the Paper Mario example, except add a mix node before the color input of the BSDF shader. Use the alpha output of the node group as the factor, and connect your head texture to the other color input of the node group. Let me know if this helps!
I got textures that use the Alpha to make the background of the image opaque. When I try using this tutorial it only works for one image at a time due the one currently showing needing to have it's Alpha of the Image linked to the Alpha of the Principled BSDF. Is there a way to make an image set like this work? Or do I have to give it a background the same colour as the skin of my character? If so, how do I make an image that makes that match up perfectly with the character?
I have an issue. around 6:44 you add a bone to the shaders. But when ever I do this the bone feature doesn't even show up. no matter what form of body part i select it doesn't show up.
Hello! Super informative video with a metric _ton_ of applications. -Though whatever reason though, I can't seem to get the texture to change beyond the second texture option. It _does_ change correctly after passing the first Greater Than threshold (at 1.000,) then just like.. refuses to change after passing the second Greater Than threshold (at 2.000.) I opened a fresh project and tried it again with simpler materials and set up on a cube, and it still doesn't work. Which doesn't make any sense, logically speaking it should work, it is so straight forward. I tried it on multiple fresh blender versions (2.92 and 2.93) and no dice.
Not sure what I could possibly be doing wrong, I'm confident I'm following your setup exactly. I feel crazy. lol -Is it possible there's some setting somewhere I have to enable, or something else bugging it out? Like I said it works when switching between 0.000 and 1.000, ..but nothing above that, ..which is so odd.
One thing I will say that does appear different are your "image files," as they appear as quote "base color" instead of the file name. Don't think that would affect anything. Even still I tried with simple rgb color values, and still the problem remains the same; it doesn't advance past the second texture/color option. Thanks in advance for any help!
This does sound odd, one possible thing is you could have Clamp enabled on your greater than nodes. Other than that though, if you'd like to Email us a couple screenshots of your node setup or even your .blend file, it'd help us troubleshoot potential issues!
@@TheObservatoryShow -Sorry, I figured it out! I am, suuper dumb. lol
What happened was I had each Greater Than node output value plugging into the _next_ Greater Than node input (top,) when I was supposed to have the _Add Node_ output plugged directly into each Greater Than input (top.) Don't know how I got that so confused, wow. Thanks though for that lightning quick response!
@@LanceBerylDev Glad you figured it out! If you have any other questions feel free to ask! 😁
You're great
Thanks for watching!
Jesus Christ I learned so much about blender from this video!!! I play it again and again in 0.25x speed 😂. Channeling a little Ian Hubert…
this worked for making the eyes transparent which was my biggest problem, but now the texture stretches? I've tried taking a texture coordinate and mapping node to fix it but it doesn't work. I'm gonna try one more thing and hope it works!
I think I fixed it, I had to manually adjust them to not be stretched!
😁 Glad you figured it out! Let me know if you run into any other issues!
Hi, i've been learning method 2 and yeah it's best method for my model so far. Thanks ! 😁
But i have a problem here, when i keyframing using I (insert keyframe on mapping nodes). The keyframe is showing in the Dopesheet but it didn't show up in Action Editor. Do you have any idea why ? I've tried to mess anything but still zero
Material keyframes will show up in the dopesheet, NLA editor and even the graph editor. However they don't show up in the Action editor. If you use the driver setup, the selector bone should show up in the action editor. There is a way to get them to show up, but it involves changing data properties which I wouldn't recommend, and could potentially mess up some other stuff!
@@TheObservatoryShow i see.. thought i did wrong in the first place. Oh and 1 more bro, my mapping nodes couldn't connected with combine xyz node because there is no connector in Location in mapping node (im using Blender 2.8, im sorry). Is there any other way to connect combine xyz node and mapping ? ✌😂
Its possible to use a series of Mapping nodes in place of the Combine XYZ nodes! Then just combine them all with Mix nodes like you would've the XYZ node. Let me know if this works, I don't currently have access to 2.8, but In my head it sounds like it would work! 😁
muito foda 👍
this video is amazing! helped so much thank you! was wondering tho if anyone has the same issue as me I wanted to do this so I can add it too an unreal project im doing but for my main charactar but am pretty new to everything so sorry if it seems like a stupid question but exporting FBX doesn't export texture would need to UV, bake then export seperetly then animating just exports the skeleton mesh but say I wanna do a Idle pose and the eyes sway then look left then right would the texture after baking and exporting animate as well? any help would be amazing
Is method 1 usable with transparent faces? I have a skin material beneath my model's face so that faces can be used between characters interchangeably
Great tutorial! though I'm running into a problem with method 2 in that when I try to use the mapping node, the UVs wont move. I'm a beginner to all of this so I wouldn't be surprised if I'm missing something here
There's quite a few things that could be going on! Make sure its the Texture coordinates UV socket connected to the Mapping nodes vector input. Also make sure that your working on your active eye texture in the Shader editor. These would be the most simple answers, let me know if they help! Thanks for watching!
@@TheObservatoryShow thx for the advice! turns out I forgot to put it into viewport shading, rookie mistake I know. now I'm experimenting ways to turn these into shape keys for unity and VRChat
Hello! Awesome tutorial as always! I got a question, when I link the rig it into another blend file . . . the rig works and changes the texture but the changes doesn't render? Is it complicated to link and override materials with drivers?
I haven't had a chance to use library overrides much yet, so I'm not entirely sure what could all be going on. As far as I know it hasn't been fully implemented yet, so that might be why it's not working! When I get a chance I'll look into it!
@@TheObservatoryShow True true, after a lot of googling. Hope someone's pointed it out to the Blender devs. But for now I just append my rigs and your drivers work perfectly.
Hi. Сool tutorial. I am new to blender. I saw this video because I myself was just trying to learn how to switch textures. only it turned out differently for me. I inserted a sequence in the image texture and switched it with an offset.
I wanted to know if it can be used like that? or there will be advantages with a mix shader and many image texture nodes?
That's one of the more common ways I've seen it done, it definitely works! The only disadvantage is there is no way to turn off the auto animation of the Image sequence, so you've got to do a lot of messing around with the offset and interpolation! However we're actually working on a video to help solve this issue, which should be out soon hopefully 😆 Thanks for watching!
For method 1 how do you set up the texture to be on the model? Like use a shrinkwrap for the texture to be on model it self or something.
In edit mode you select the faces that encompass where the eye texture will lay> Hit U to Unwrap them > Then line the UVs up with the eye texture. We cover this process in Episode 8 of Mario in detail: ruclips.net/video/koZYMOO1XPQ/видео.html Let me know if this helps!
@@TheObservatoryShow I have problem where when i make the seam for the eye area, it mess the the seams for the texture and mess up the overall model textures. I was wondering if there a way for me to get around this with out mess up my textures.
Under Object Data properties you can add an additional UV Map and unwrap the eye faces to the new UV map. Use a UV map node in your eye texture, then select the eyes UV map on the UV map node and connect the output of that node to the vector input of your eye image texture. Let me know if this is confusing, or helps at all. It's definitely a potential topic for a future video!
@@TheObservatoryShow Thank you , but it there a way for me to get rid of the of parts of the model because once I made the new UV map and and seam up the eye part to unwrap, once i did it the eye section is there but the other parts of the model is under it. Wondering if there is a way to solve that
Is there actual object geometry under the new eye UV, or textures? I'm having difficulty picturing what you're explaining without seeing it, if you want you can Email us a screenshot or a .blend file and we can take a look at it!
Hi, i think u could make something like this just using the image texture on image secuence mode and adding a driver to the offset
Yes, you definitely can! Nodes are the best! Thanks for watching 😄
tengo una pregunta, como puedo hacer el metodo 3 pero en el lado opuesto?
So the eye textures are in separate object as the head?
You can use a separate object, but they can also be part of the head. You just need to plan out your UVs accordingly, or use multiple UV maps! The key is that the eyes have a separate material from the face. Let me know if this helps. Thank you for watching!
@@TheObservatoryShow Ahh yes, I've been doing that. Like the head and the eyes are on the different texture maps and the eye map is alpha one right?
so will I be able to animate this in unity? once I've followed the instructions?
The node groups are currently only usable in Blender. You can definitely animate textures in Unity, but I don't know how 😅 Thanks for watching!
When using method one, are you able to cross fade between animations or will that cause the face texture to cycle between the intermediate faces as you change from one animation to another?
How did you make the textures you use?
Many of the models/textures I used came from www.models-resource.com/ it's a great site!
Hey, so what if I want to have a smooth transition from one texture to the next?
Awesome tutorial this really helped out! However, I've run into a problem where the texture would turn pink after using more than 8 mix nodes( method 1 ). Do you have any tips on fixing that? (using eevee)
I've recently found out that Eevee has a texture limit per material of 24! I'm not sure the scope of your project, but there are a couple workarounds that may be helpful. You can incorporate method 3 and have multiple fully(capped) textured objects, that you switch between for your different poses. Another user suggested using an Image Sequence Node. You have to name your textures ending with sequential numbers, and it'll cycle through the images with the Timeline. You have to keyframe the Offset field of the Image Sequence Node, using linear interpolation and constant interpolation when needed. Let me know if this helps!
Hey thanks! I didn't know about the texture limit and I will try out the other methods!
ok so i am using some mouths texture with a transparent background, i did what i had to do and it work but not entierly, at first i could not see the black line of the mouth, so i did the thing for transparency, now i can completly see the mouth but the background is still black .
i went into the material setting and change the blend mode, it's finally transparent but the skin color is darker around the mouth, it's obviously not the shadow, it's so annoying everytime i find a solution, another problem appears.
Troubleshooting can be a process! Without seeing it, it's hard to visualize/figure out what could be happening. If you're comfortable with it, you can Email us your .Blend file and I'll take a look at it! If you decide to send it, since its dealing with textures you need to pack those into your file first. To do that >File >External Data >Select Automatically Pack into .Blend. Let me know! Thank you for watching 😀
Hello. Thanks for the tutorial video but i have a Problem can you help me Please the face is not moving with the body
thankyou, im trying todo 2d animation in blender and my character has different body images and im trying to turn off and on different images, i think this will do it. tho idk how to key frame the value of the nodes
Keyframing is pretty simple, with the timeline/dopesheet/action editor/etc open, navigate to the frame of choice, and with your mouse hovering over the node value, hit "I" to add a keyframe to that frame.
@@TheObservatoryShow thankyou very much! love al the content.
Can method 1 be done with objects? So that they appear and disappear for example types of hairstyles or backpacks etc ?
You could set it up so that the materials become transparent, but the better option would be method 3 for animating visibility of objects! You can setup the selection Interface the same way as method 1 and 2 for method 3 as well. Let me know if this answers your question! Thank you for watching.
@@TheObservatoryShow he conseguido este resultado con unos tutoriales que vi igual muchas gracias twitter.com/DiedSora/status/1414378539445534726?s=20
That looks amazing!