Combining separate face / body animation imports (FBX) in UE4 workflow?

Hi,

We have been trying to figure out how we can take different types of mocap data and assign them to the same model within UE4, namely face animation and body animation. We can get the separate FBX files (all mesh, rig, and animations data included) into UE4, but combining the two is where we are having issues.

**edit update:
So we are getting fairly close, in that we have the head (neck movement, etc) spliced in with the body movement via a “Layered Blend Per Bone” node in the Animation Blueprint. It does not, however, carry over the facial animation from the blend shapes (that are otherwise viewable if just viewing the face animation fox in UE4 by itself).

Any suggestions? It seems like we’re just not getting the blend shapes to carry on through at this point.

Just wanted to reply with the solution that we came to, in hopes of saving others some frustration down the road:
Blend shapes, it seems, will not apply unless there is a compatible shader applied to the mesh. Our FBX import didn’t have this, but as soon as this was done…everything worked fine. :slight_smile:

I’m not using blend shapes for facial animation but actual mocap data

Usually I keep the facial animation and the body animation separately inside Softimage, however I came up with a solution which combines both Facial Rig and Body Rig…I found out that the facial rig that I’m using could be easily integrated into Maya and Max without too much effort :wink:

If needed I export two separate animation tracks ( face and body ) and add them into Matinee or bake directly everything and import the rig and the animation together inside UE4 :slight_smile:

that’s a good plan but maybe you should think about the seperate animation tracks, you have to be careful so you won’t switch the faces and put them in the wrong body, but hey, im preaching to the quire ahahahaha :slight_smile:

As an observation if using Maya the better option might be to use clusters and bones over and above blend shapes.

Blends or morphs are cool but does have the requirement that vertex counts must match from player model to player model as being “unique” and could become time consuming creating blend shapes for each and every player model.

Clusters on the other hand are bone based and since all player models can share the same skeleton one only has to drive a single rig and player models updated as to freedom of motion.

Just for interest blend or morphs in 3ds Max are easier to do as the morph data is contained in the morph modifier and is imported into UE4 as part of the mesh.