Hello all. I have been thinking of taking a road less travelled; 2D facial animation on 3D heads. A good example is the Lego movie. 
If anyone knows how this can be achieved in iClone (preferably a video tutorial), please let me know. Thanks. 



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System: Win 11_Home, CPU i9-10850k (3.60GHz), 32GB RAM, RTX3080 GPU (10GB VRAM), 2TB SSD, 2TB HDD. It's definitely time for an upgrade!

You could simulate 2D with 3D blendshapes.. Otherwise, the AI... but not inside iClone I suppose.

I did it once as a quick test for a lego character: https://forum.reallusion.com/FindPost534160.aspx
But nothing fancy. Blendshapes for the face profile was done in CC using mesh edit mode.

This is how it looks with mesh view enabled. One more level of head mesh subdivision would allow to build more dynamic blendshapes
(preferably outside of CC for advanced editing capabilities such as slide-sculpt to preserve the original head shape.).

Thanks for the response. I was hoping to do the 2D texture within iClone. If this is not currently possible, i will have to put off the project for a while as i figure out what the easiest and fastest method is.



EDIT:
Just came across this video. The method shown at 3:00 - 3:50 is quite close to what i had in mind. I unfortunately dont know Blender that well, but I will do a few tests in iClone this week to see if I can recreate something similar.






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System: Win 11_Home, CPU i9-10850k (3.60GHz), 32GB RAM, RTX3080 GPU (10GB VRAM), 2TB SSD, 2TB HDD. It's definitely time for an upgrade!

The method shown at 3:00 - 3:50 is quite close to what i had in mind.

You can do pretty much the same in iClone: https://forum.reallusion.com/FindPost445076.aspx
I am just not sure how efficient would that be for the face animation.

this could very well work! I'm guessing its just a matter of keframing mouth and eye shapes.
I just need to figure out how you made the slideshow, or do you have a tutorial? Once the slideshow is up and running, i would simply need to create a plane that conforms to the character's head (if i remember correctly, this is achieved easily in Blender)

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System: Win 11_Home, CPU i9-10850k (3.60GHz), 32GB RAM, RTX3080 GPU (10GB VRAM), 2TB SSD, 2TB HDD. It's definitely time for an upgrade!

I do not have a formal tutorial, but it's fairly simple.
You evenly distribute images across Base Color map texture, set fixed tiling and then set relative UV coordinates with UV offset for the timeline.
I made this quick one just now:

I have no idea what you said, but the video definitely speaks volumes! Thank you very much! I'll do some tests and give feedback

______________________________________________________________________________________________________________
System: Win 11_Home, CPU i9-10850k (3.60GHz), 32GB RAM, RTX3080 GPU (10GB VRAM), 2TB SSD, 2TB HDD. It's definitely time for an upgrade!