If you love the retro 3D game aesthetic of animating the textures on the face of a character and want to be able to do it for yourself, but need a little help to get started, this is the class for you!

This class is an introduction to applying hand drawn faces to low-poly 3D characters for that 90’s game console feel.

Using all free software - the Godot 3D game engine and the Krita painting program - I’ll show you how I use a texture atlas to bring life and emotion to game characters.

An hour from now you get to see your artwork in a game!

I’ve always loved this art style, but when I came to use it in my own games, I couldn’t find any tutorials for it, so I had to figure it out for myself. I decided then that one day I would make the tutorials I wished existed when I was learning.

In this class, you will learn:

The basics of making a texture atlas
How to use the texture atlas as animation frames
How to keyframe texture offsets in Godot’s AnimationPlayer

You'll do this by drawing a range of facial expressions and arranging them into a grid to make a texture atlas, learning how your grid maps to UV co-ordinates, then importing your drawing into Godot, assigning it to a character's face material and animating its UV offset to display the different frames.

Towards the end of the class, when you've already put this technique into practice in the Godot project I've provided for you, I'll show you the technical things you need to know to use this in your own projects.

Changing facial expressions is just one application of this technique!
UV offset animation is also used for rivers and waterfalls, fire, smoke, fog, melting effects - anything where making the texture slide or snap to different positions would be a good effect!

This class suitable for all levels, as everything is provided for you - even the example texture atlas I drew!
I'm assuming you'll want to draw your own, but if that's not the case for you, you can still learn about UV offset animation using the drawings I did.

Beginners will be able to take advantage of the nearly-complete project I provide, and the clear step-by-step instructions I give to finish it, while more experienced Godot users may find this a useful new technique to add to their repertoire and be able to springboard from this class straight into exploring and expanding on it in their own projects.

For those wanting to go further, I am working on classes exploring UV offset facial animation in Godot in greater depth.

To complete this class you will need:

A computer that can run Godot 4: anything made in the last decade or so should be fine, running Windows, Mac or Linux.
Godot 4
Drawing software with layers, such as Krita

Brian Baldwin

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