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Study: 2D Stylized Eyes

VFX: Warden Eyes (2D Stylized)

All the main characters made use of these eyes

All the main characters made use of these eyes

Warden: Melody of the Undergrowth sports a specific cartoon inspired art style. This was my solution to dynamic eyes in game.
Through the use of a separate mesh resting atop the characters face, with two sets of UVs I developed a custom shader and animation setup for dynamic 2D eyes. This allowed us to make use of character eye tracking, allowing them to look at points of interest in the game world drawing the player to important objects.
The first part of the 2D eye solution is the central eye, we only use one eye and mirror it onto the other side of the mesh.
The second part is the Iris, this makes use of the second UV set which is NOT mirriored, allowing the iris to point in the same direction. By offsetting the UV position of the iris we can move the iris on the eye, controlled by a set of animations in a 2D blend tree we can feed the data from the player script to the animator of the eyes to handle where they look.

Date
February 16, 2017