1.l Build the morphs

Once you have gotten the parent head mesh to be exactly what you want AND you have finished mapping it, then it is time to build your morph targets.

Basically, morph animation means that a mesh is moving vertices to targets in 3D space over time. I'll say that again: the mesh (your exported, parent head) is moving vertices to targets in 3D space (the morph positions) over time (your animation).

Building a morph is pretty easy, at least on the surface. Remember, at this stage, your mesh is not weighted - once you have weighted it, you can not make a morph from it. Anywho, just select the parent head mesh and Shift+move it to make a copy. A little naming dialog will appear so name the mesh and then hit OK. The name can be anything right now as you will go in and name it correctly later. Wow! You just created a morph target!

Now, your job is to move the vertices on this morph target to the maximum limit of this morph target. For example, if your goal is to build an avatar smile, you ought to build the smile exactly how you intend it to show up in IMVU.

1.m Morph naming suffixes

The morph targets have a naming convention that dictates what kind of morph they are. This naming convention must be used or your morphs will not play back in IMVU. An example of a properly named morph target is leftBlink.Clamped where the .Clamped suffix is the morph type. The prefix of the name COULD be anything you like but OUGHT to be what we list in the next section below. Here is a breakdown of what the four morph types are and what they mean:

.Clamped - allows multiple morph animations to affect the channel but clamps the sum of their effects to 100%

.Average - allows multiple morph animations to affect the channel, averages the result.

.Exclusive - allows only one morph animation (the most recent one applied) to affect the channel, no cap on value (ie allows values greater than 100%)

.Additive - allows multiple animations to affect the channel, values are added together.

1.n Morph name list

As mentioned above, you COULD name your morphs anything you like and then make your own facial animation products to play those morphs. However, that would really be a waste of time. The IMVU avatars have many hundreds of facial animations already built into the system. All of the idle animations; the animations that go along with things like breakdance, kick, hug, kiss, tackle; the embedded animations in Head and Scenes; the list goes on and on.

The way the system works is simple: an XPF (or morph animation file) contains a list of active morphs over time. Said another way, the XPF you use for a smile animation would include the smile morph target name. It would also include a number of frames at which this morph changed. For example, the smile morph at frame 0 is at 0%, the smile morph at frame 10 is at 50%, the smile morph at frame 15 is at 100%, and so on.

By building the list of morphs below, you guarantee that your head will animate perfectly with all of the existing animations already in use in IMVU. Very cool.

The morphs that IMVU uses in all of its existing avatar animations is as follows:

blink.Left.Lower.Clamped
blink.Left.Upper.Clamped
blink.Right.Lower.Clamped
blink.Right.Upper.Clamped

eyebrow.Left.Angry.Average
eyebrow.Left.Down.Average
eyebrow.Left.Sad.Average
eyebrow.Left.Up.Average

eyebrow.Right.Angry.Average
eyebrow.Right.Down.Average
eyebrow.Right.Sad.Average
eyebrow.Right.Up.Average

left.Eye.Down.Clamped
left.Eye.Left.Clamped
left.Eye.Right.Clamped
left.Eye.Up.Clamped

right.Eye.Down.Clamped
right.Eye.Left.Clamped
right.Eye.Right.Clamped
right.Eye.Up.Clamped

mouth.Frown.Exclusive
mouth.Grin.Exclusive
mouth.Mad.Exclusive
mouth.Open.Exclusive
mouth.Pucker.Exclusive
mouth.Smile.Exclusive
mouth.Surprise.Exclusive
mouth.Tongue.Exclusive

Face.Average

That's right - 29 morphs.

NOTE: Remember, you don't have to build any or all of these morphs if you don't want to. For a bare bones head, I would build only the eye and blink morphs as these are the only ones necessary to make the head feel sentient.