Eye Shapes: Building new shapes from existing ones
If you are not familiar with creating shapes yourself, the Unified Expressions documentation on VRCFaceTracking can be a good reference.
Most eye shapes consist in assembling existing blendshapes into a new shape.
For instance, Eye Look Up is a shape that generally (depending on your style):
- Moves the top eyelid slightly up,
- and also moves the bottom eyelid slightly up.
However, artist-authored blendshapes rarely have such a setup.
For this reason, you can assemble this Eye Look Up shape by adding shapes together:
- Taking the top part of an existing blendshape that makes the eyelids wider, like a surprise blendshape.
- Taking the bottom part of an existing blendshape that makes the eyelids narrower, like a squinting blendshape.
In some cases, you avatar may not have an appropriate blendshape. If that happens, you can try to improvise by using another blendshape in a way that is not intended:
A negative value will make the blendshape move in the opposite direction. If a blendshape makes something big, putting a negative value will make it small. There are some limitations of this approach, but it can help if your avatar doesn’t have the necessary blendshapes.
