Mouth AO Component

The AnimazeShader has a simple way to deal with the ambient occlusion of the mouth in all avatars.

Based on some animation inputs, when closing the mouth, the light that is affecting the mouth interior is attenuated based on a monochrome occlusion texture map, and the effect is reduced when opening the mouth.

The mouth interior usually has a different material than the one outside of the mouth, therefore, at import, the Animaze system will identify the two materials and will break the mesh into two separate ones, each assigned with its own texture map.

The Fake Mouth AO component applies solely to avatars, because it needs mouth animation inputs. Adding it to props would only lower the performance (due to loading a texture and processing useless instructions) without any graphical benefit.

Requirements:

• Mouth AO Texture – RGB texture.

  • the texture holds the minimum brightness value in the red channel, for when the avatar’s mouth is closed.

  • the green channel is reserved for mouth fully opened.

  • blue channel it’s used for the tongue. The tongue can dynamically travel from inside the mouth to outside the mouth so we need to mark what parts of the tongue need to be occluded less when the tongue sticks out.