well, its almost time for the stable release… and i guess its time to re-do my rigs, since the measurements in blender have changed to more of an industry standard, my old fbx’s are now a problem… seems i can only append them in and adjust the scale (shrug)… then of course there is facial… (poses, key shapes?)
i think 2.8 is a good idea because of eevee and a really nice pbr system… but… is it time to get a skeletal rig into glFL? i saw in github that it is being worked on and 4.23 is getting closer to… well lots of things…
any other observations on 2.8 and blender’s brave new world?
The UI is a massive improvement. I was tried opening a blend file in 2.79 and could not believe how awkward it is to use after spending time using the 2.80 version. Scaling still does not work well between UE4 and Blender for rigged characters. Although this is more of an FBX import/export issue rather than anything wrong with blender. I hope epic patches their fbx importer to fully support blender. I think it can be done relatively easily on the UE4 engine side of things and an official solution would be much better than custom patches to either system by users.
While we are talking of rigging be sure to check my script (paid item) for rigging and animating any character for blender 2.8.
yeah, need some blender love here :)… i’m more of a pixel by pixel kinda guy… if i build it, i know how it works
i really want to get rid of facial bones (cept teeth and eyes maybe) so i can make my mixamo chars faster to add with shape keys… get a good OCX so the hair in blender can transport as mesh with a quick weight paint in UE… streamline things if you will…
It works a lot faster then 2.79. Aside from aesthetics It seems to be just proper coding vs shoddy work that was pieced together.
it obviously still has its downfalls and issues.
For instance (at least until you can get the latest version of my addon) you cannot export animation curves along with your FBX.
And, well the whole import export FBX addon is still pretty bad in terms of implementations of the Autodesk file format but it does do what you need even in its stock version without curves and all that jazz.
I have been coding plugins for it specific to UE4 for about a month or so this far.
The difference under the hood on the way things are handled is immense in reality.
starting with class and module registration and ending with preventing silly mistakes on the coder’s part by just not allowing some bad practices.
Anyway.
in terms of handing the animation with facial expressions and all of that, you should just take the time to extrude the 2.
You can completely recombine the face by attaching it on top of the base skeletal mesh like they do for many games including Forthnight.
basically there is no need to have movement and facial expressions tied together ever since .18 according to the fortnight animator talks.
this is basically why I came up with my current plugin, BoneBreaker.
I needed an easy way to author / create / correct marketplace animations so that I could then re-target my skeletal mesh onto them and animate the rest while being 100% sure the underlaying movent is exactly what I want.
Right Now I’m basically playing chicken with Blender waiting on an official release date in order to release the Animation Curves addon as part of Bone Breaker and as a separate export entity.
yeah, i’ve been racking my brain on just how to transfer facial, and weight painting is slowing me down every time… and the time has come, with 2.8, to just take care of it once and for all… i’ll have to do some research on fortnight and such…
i’ve heard that 7/11/19 is the release date… then again 10/18 was the release date too
What issue are you having specifically with facial?
The miximo rigs are usually already weight painted and come with a humanoid skeleton that you can somewhat easily create a metarig out of to control (compared to the ue4 one).
Doing it manually, yes it is a long process since you have tons of bones - however rigify can also help with that a bit by providing the bone structure to paint upon (which obviously still takes time).
there is no real cheat way if you start a sculpt from scratch, but if instead you take a mesh that is already weight painted and modify it (including adding loop cuts) the underlying weight paint should (note its Should) be preserved.
I was able to make my basic character rig that way at least.
Shape keys (morph targets) have been working for a bit now.
The coolest thing was probably the additive poses from a talk a while back. That would take time to do though.
There is a specific talk I cannot find with an (i believe japanese) engeneer lady who explains a bunch of interesting things with additive poses, animation curves, and a bunch of features that are now live and working.
in fact it may have been a preview or feature update video rather then a livestream (which would explain why I was unable to find it again).
if I can find a link I’ll share it.
with mix i have no problem with the standard rig, but they don’t do facial anymore… so i made my own facial rig. for the rigs i want facial on i use the same rig and parent with empty groups, then transfer weight paints by name… the body is fine, but the face is a mess that takes me days to clean up…
with 2.8 coming out i kinda want to make ‘my character 8.0’ as the last iteration… and that would be facial that doesn’t take days or weeks to transfer… i have 1600 mocaps for mixamo so i want to stay with that format… (cinematics)… the control rig is a nice addition but does it need bones or can it use morph or with virtual bones maybe… i have a need to know…
so these are the things that have been keeping me tossing and turning all night for the last few weeks… which direction to take (no i don’t own an phone)… it’s just the next thing on the list (yes, i do remember her, maybe she will pass by our universe again some day) (smile)…