I’m a bit late to the conversation, but I wanted to say thanks to everyone who’s contributed to this thread as it’s been immensely helpful. I thought I’d share some of my own findings here too.
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Model
I ended up joining all the objects of the body together (with the exceptions of the nose and paint objects) and using the merge vertices by distance function to ensure they were all connected. Before doing this the model would sometimes break apart at the seams while posing the character. Joining them solved that issue.
Eye Texture
As others have mentioned before, if the sclera (whites) of the eyes appear black in Cycles, all you have to do to fix this is switch the Color Space of the Base Color (albedo texture) to Non-Color. Unfortunately this also makes the outline of the eye pale, but this can be fixed by placing a Gamma node after the Base Color and setting the value to 2.2 (a fact that took me about two days to figure out.)
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Eye Texture Switcher
In order to easily switch between the eye textures for animation I used a combination of
SouthernShotty’s 2D face rig setup,
Allen3D’s slider*, and a driver function.
The slider was made by adding a Mix Shader and using Ctrl+G to make it into a group. After hitting tab to enter the group, I deleted the Mix Shader, then in the side panel of the Shader Editor (accessible by hitting N) under the Group tab I selected the Shader values in the Inputs and Outputs sections and clicked the minus remove them. I then selected the Fac value under Inputs and changed the Min to -1 and Max to 14.99 (because I had a sequence of 15 images for each of the texture nodes.) This left the node group with a Fac value that could act as a slider.
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I imported the albedo, mix, and normal textures each as image sequences, set the Frames to 1, and made sure Auto Refresh was checked. To get the Fac value on the slider node group to switch each of these textures simultaneously, I right clicked on it and selected Copy As New Driver. I then right clicked the Offset values of each image sequence and selected Paste Driver. Now sliding the Fac value allowed me to quickly switch between eye textures, and I could even keyframe it for animation.
I also used a similar setup for the mouth texture, setting the Fac value Max to 7.99 instead of 14.99 as there were only 8 mouth textures.
*I found the slider tutorial through one of Densle’s
behind the scenes videos for his ACNH animated series.
Rig
I deleted the original rig and vertex groups and generated new ones using the Rigify add-on. It was surprisingly straightforward and worked really well. Checking Preserve Volume on the armature modifier for the clothing helped it keep its shape a little better. I did delete the soft mesh object from the shorts, however, as I couldn’t work out how to get them to move with the rest of the mesh without clipping or distortion.
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Again, thanks to everyone who’s added to this thread, and all the best to anyone trying this out!
