Can UV Maps be manipulated with a controller in Daz Studio?
ghastlycomic
Posts: 2,531
If you watch that tutorial on how the eyes were animated in Twilight Princess you'll see the geometry never moves they just move the UV map around to give the illusion of the eyes moving. This is actually very brilliant because the biggest problem with creating highly stylized eyes is the physical geometry does not often conform to the reality of anatomy. You have large expressive "anime" styled eyes, but if the actual eyes were orbs they'd end up extruding outside the head. This is why it's so hard to get a 3D character that has 2D styling without simply using texture maps for the facial details, since anything 3D is going to have the same constraints that a real world object would.
If we could use an expression controller to slide the UV map of the eyes around that would really open up a lot of possibilities for character creation.
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Comments
Not the actual UV values, but in Shader Mixer (and in Shader Builder or hand-made RSL shaders) you could manipulate the UV values in responsse to the time/frame number. The main issue would be how to control the effect - it might be simpler just to user different maps on the same template and change which map was used frame-by-frame.
The geometry is available to script, so the UV values could be adjusted there, or a plug-in could be written - but those would probably need hard-coded values, and only the plug-in would offer any reasonable prospect of having a visual way to adjust the animation I think.
Perhaps you had a (no doubt badly-fitting) proxy eyeball that didn't render could be used for keying and its rotations could be used to control the UV offsets of the mesh or texture; that could be done with script or plug-in, but I'm not aware it could be done with a shader.
Bummer.
For static You only need add a layer with mix brick and offset this, of course in shader mixer/builder. Only two parameters in surface tab horizontal/vertical, four if you want independent eyes.