Hi guys,

I'm working on an anime style head, and I found myself thinking it might be easier to just not have an eyeball, and instead make the eye part of the face. But to do it that way would require me to use a bone to control the position of the decal for the pupil. I can't figure out if this can be done, or how to do it. Any thoughts?

The decal position is not a property you can animate. You can use an animated decal that contains all the positions you need and control the displayed frame in a relationship.

1) Make a short movie/image sequence with all your facial expressions on seperate frames.
2) Import your movie and apply as a decal to your model's face.
3) Create a new Action for your model and then expand your model's shortcut to get at the decal's "Timing" properties.
4)Go to frame 0 and set "Frame" to whatever frame of your movie holds the facial expression that you want your character to start with. Repeat for all frames, using double keying to hold frames or build whole sequences into your animated decals and let A:M interpolate between frames.

It is a very powerful and economical way of animating, especially suitable for anime.
I would like to be able to select the frames via a pose slider but I haven't worked out a way of accessing the decal's timing properties from a pose.

Good luck and post some examples.

Thanks for the quick replies. That's what I was afraid of, though. I'm going to wind up going with my original plan of using a distortion box on a regular eyeball. I'll post some WIP shots later today...

Now the next time I build lego characters in AM, though, I'll know exactly how to animate the faces!!!

A material position can be animated so a decal in a projection map material could be animated that way.

Materials>New Material

RMB Attribute>Change Type to>Plugin>Hash Inc.>Projection Map


choose an image for it and a projection method and drop the material on a group like any other.

You can animate its position if you enable "show more than drivers" in the chor.

Nice Tip RobCat!

Nice! And I can create a relationship to use a bone to control it, right? Just like using a bone to drive decal strength?

Yeah. I must try that sometime. Thanks, Robert.

I'm sure you'll let us know!

You'll want to investigate Marcos's Smartskin Driven Decals too!

Here's a direct link to the demo of it on Xtas's site if you don't care to search and click for it:

http://www.xtaz.com.br/index.php?option=co...0&Itemid=63

Hey, thanks Rodney! That might be just what I'm looking for!

Does anyone know where the old tutprial on setting up a relationship to drive decal strength is at? I've been searching for half an hour, and I can't find it...

Yeah, Marco's solution should work perfectly, considering how big the Irises are for the character, they won't need to move very much anyway. And, it covers what the tutorial I was searching for covered too!

Expressions should works as well.