Hello! I am creating an enemy blueprint. This character will have the same body mesh, but I want a variety of heads/faces. I have created about twenty different face meshes right now. I have taught myself to use the ART tools in maya, and I already took a test character through the pipe and into the game. Right now, i have rigged a bunch of different heads that all can spawn on the character. I have included rig controls for blinks, expressions, and secondary movement, so I will not be using morph targets for this sort of thing. Thankfully, since they are topologically consistent, I can share skin weights between them, which cuts down on rigging time. But that made me wonder that since they are consistent, I could also rig just one head directly onto my character, and assign which face I want as a morph target.
What I want to know is if this method is sound, and if it could potentially cause slowdown as I have heard that morph targets can be CPU intensive. It would be something where a value is generated and set in the construction script for the character, so their vertices wouldn’t be moving to different targets during gameplay very much.
I’d like to know if anyone has any experience with this sort of thing and if they could recommend that I do it one way or another, and why.
Thank you very much!