Facial

[HeroBiX]

anyone knows a tutorial or documentary on how to import facial to Unreal?

I want the body as one animation and the facial as one and then merge does together in Unreal to one nice animation

[Denny]

You're too vague in your question. I get that you want to separate Facial and Body animation on a character. How is your character built though? Is the head and body two completely different meshes? Or is the character one mesh where you want to split the animation onto different joint hierarchies? Are you planning to use blend shapes / morph targets? Or is it FaceFX we're talking about?

[HeroBiX]

The character Iam talking about has the same mesh/bones
they are separate but I also have them merge together so they working as one mesh and bone hierarchie
I have Mocaped Facial animation, so I think blend shapes/morph targets will not be in the agenda =)
I think it's FaceFX we are talking about

[Denny]

FaceFX doesn't use pre-existing animation, it generates new one so it isn't on the agenda either then. What you'll want to do is export your MoCap animation as a separate AnimSet with unique animation names and add it to the AnimSet hierarchy. After that you need to add a new slot in your AnimTree (if you're using Matinée) which separates the face joints from the body. Then you simply play the MoCap animation on that Slot in the Matinée and it should be separated to the face.

[HeroBiX]

sounds good =)

another question, if I export the body animation and that he has the facial rig to, can you export the facial data on a separate rig and then update the rig in Unreal?

so, export the body animation with the full working rig incl facial rig, then export only the facial anim to then merge it in Unreal =)

[Denny]

You can have two different AnimSets with different joint structures, if you make an array of them the animation will only play on the joints it can find and ignore the non-existing ones. So you can have an AnimSet with only the Facial Joints Animation and the other with only the Body Joints Animation, if you add both to an array they should be able to play on a mesh with both setups.

So yes, you can export the facial animation separately to it's own AnimSet and play it on the body even though it doesn't include all the joints.

[HeroBiX]

what do you recommend one to do?
I got the request of having the body and facial separate in Unreal

[Denny]

Hard to say without working on the character myself, you'll have to experiment I'm afraid.

[HeroBiX]

I will keep you posted =)
Thanks Denny

[HeroBiX]

I should import everything as one mesh/skeleton

- but I bump into some problems, one is that my character starts running weird, feeling of no gravity, matrix like, doing the animation but doing really weird rotations with the whole body

- I implement only the facial animation to the rig, he is standing in some kind of T-pose, the face moves in Maya, but in Unreal it's just in his T-pose, is there some speial way of importing facial into Unreal?

- then another thing, is there a nice way so I can tell Unreal to split up the body animation and the facial into two animsets with just importing one animation? spiting up to face and body inside unreal?

[Denny]

I believe the answer to the first question is that your AnimSet is set to bRotationsOnly. You must disable it to use translations, it's on the lower left in the AnimSet somewhere.

[HeroBiX]

I will check it out =) thanks!

[Winwarproductions]

This is going to come out bad. Denny I don't know you but I love ya.
"Anim Rotation Only" setting had me thinking I was slap crazy. When I first initially import my character with facial rig in UDK everything works. The face animation is working perfectly. So later when I add another bone to it in 3dsmax maybe for the eyebrows, and import it, the animation doesn't play in UDK but the other face animation played before, so I figured why wouldn't the eyes. I was really thinking about drop kicking, and upper cutting my monitor, but you just saved it's life. Now the animation works again. Now I know I can add as many bones as I want and not just for face. I do keep track of them by naming them. b_lefteyebrow etc. I had made a video of it a few days ago, but the advice you gave about the "Anim Rotation Only" setting should have been in it. I'm going to have to update that video. That was the only thing holding me up for the first matinee in the first part of my game.

UDK Tutorial 05_14_2010 face animation from 3dsmax to UDK
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JsrB7voKq5U

My UDK thread
http://forums.epicgames.com/showthread.php?t=718917&page=18

My Portfolio
http://michaeljcollinsdreamart.com