Morph Transfers Between Characters

After completing this tutorial, you will be able to save time by baking morph targets from one character to another.

Although the heads in the image below look different, they share the same topology and vertex index. This allows you to transfer morph targets from one head to another.

You will transfer the existing morphs from the African-American head on the left to the Asian head on the right.

Note: You need to have CryTools installed in order to use the methods described below.

Facial Morph Setup Overview

1. To begin, open the scene of the head with the existing morph targets. The African-American head in the upper-left corner is the base head, without morphs. The blue morphs are symmetrical morphs. The red ones are asymmetrical morphs. The green squares are helpers.

Procedure

2. Now, apply a morph modifier to the African-American head and add all of the morphs that should be baked to the Asian head. In this case, add all symmetrical and asymmetrical morphs to it.

3. Delete all morph targets from the African-American head.

Typically, the UVs of the characters do not match. Therefore you need to use an intermediate step.

4. Create a copy of the Asian head (red wireframe).
5. Create a morpher for the Asian head, choose the African-American head as a morph target and set the value to 100%.
6. Collapse the morpher modifier (see the results below - green wireframe).

7. Copy the morpher from the African-American head to the Asian head (green wireframe). Delete the African-American head as it is no longer needed.
8. Add the copy of the Asian head (red wireframe) as a morph to the existing morpher modifier on the green head and change the amount to 100%.

9. Open the CryMorphManager and open the "Facial Tools".
10. Select the green head and click Add on the "Load Morphs From Selection" button. The tool will load all the morphs that are added to the morph modifier and display how many morphs are stored.
11. When you activate "Organize", the generated morphs will be automatically aligned to the helper. Call the helper for this Dummy_+the # name of the morph. For example: "Dummy_Lip_funneler".
12. All generated morphs will be moved into a new layer. For this, set the name of the new layer in the text box beside the New Layer.
13. Before you press the "Bake Morphs" button, be sure that you have selected the head with the morph modifier. Now you are ready to generate the morphs.

Note: The bake function will also generate a copy of your copy (red head) that you loaded into the morph modifier. Delete it if you don't need it.

Result

Due to the different facial structure, the transferred morphs need some tweaking, especially in the mouth area.