It's been a while, so I thought I would share some of the things I have been working on for the Unity setup and what I hope to get out in the next release.
Over the new year I have been experimenting with the Amplify Shader Editor, to produce better shaders for the
URP and Built-in pipeline. It has many more features and produces much better shaders than Unity's own shader graph:
- Anisotropic hair shader with rim transmission and shadow clipping.
- Subsurface effects in the skin, eyes, tongue and teeth.
- Parallax depth mapping in the iris of the eyes. (Which means the eye is a now a single opaque material that can be lit and receive shadows properly.)
So far I've completed the
URP versions, the Built-in versions are next.
Also some animation and facial expression previewing tools have been added, which work in the editor scene view so you can preview animations and expressions without having to go into play mode.
You can see a demo of these features here:
Further down the line I'm hoping to include some animation correction and re-targeting solutions:
I'm sure you've all seen the problem, animations from other third parties that leave the mouth wide open, the hunched shoulders and bent fingers. These are all correctable.
And finally re-targeting Blend shapes in facial animations. Animations with Blend shape tracks can be played anywhere, but they are keyed to the object names from the source character and need to be remapped to any different objects in the new character.
That's it for now. There's a lot to do.