How should you make a character to talk?

Any suggestions on workflows or tutorials for facial animations/morph targets, for beginners ?

Well, it depends on your character setup. Are you using MetaHuman? If yes, then you want to look into LiveLinkFace which is available on the iPhone app store. Sadly it only works with iPhone XR and above as it needs the face scanning tech. You can get a XR pretty cheap now though. Here’s a tutorial: Live Link Face Tutorial with New Metahumans in Unreal Engine 4 - YouTube

If you’re not using MetaHuman then there are a ton of different approaches. Usually using blend shapes set up in your 3D package as morph targets imported into the engine which can be driven either inside a Sequence or through blueprint. For my indie game since I didn’t want to go through the painstaking process of creating thousands of facial sequences, I actually just created a blueprint with a bunch of generic morph manipulations of the mouth moving randomly for varying durations and it worked really well. I found as long as the mouth is moving when the character is talking and stops moving when they finish, you don’t have to worry so much about the accuracy.

In terms of tutorials, the easiest thing is to use something like Mixamo Fuse or Reallusion’s Character Creator where the characters come with Morph targets built-in. In terms of making your own, it would depend on the 3D software you’re using. I would just do a search on YouTube for “Blender Facial Morphs” but replace Blender with the software you use. Here’s an example for Blender: Blender shapes key animations to UE4 morph targets animations - YouTube

For how to trigger them in-engine, I found this for Blueprint Driven Morphs: Working with morph targets. The easy way - YouTube

And this for Sequencer: UE4.27 - Add Morphs To Sequencer - (Tutorial) - YouTube

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Character Creator is too expensive and blender on the other hand is very frustrating.
Thanks for the help anyway!

Well sorry to say there is no free lunch or such thing as a make it easy button and I can assure you that everyone here started out in the same place at some point in time. My first attempt at animation was moving a ball from point a to point b and I built up from there. TorQueMoD gave you some good starting points.

My suggestion is not to be your own obstacle to learning and that starting out at ground zero is very frustrating

There is no such thing as a free launch, but If we had a normal educational background, everything would be easy-peasy!
But guess what, animation school can be more expensive than Harvard Medical School… :smiley:
Anyway, this topic is the least covered out there, in tutorials and such, and having a hard time not even being able to work around it, seems quite unfair.

OK it sounds to me that you want to get into lip sync as to ways and means to practice the craft and not get involved in constructing the necessary assets?

An option in this area could be Metahuman which you could import into UE5 or use the tool available through examples to examine how it’s all constructed.

Another option is Daz Studio along with the Genesis 9 framework where once again you can practice using the provided morph targets.

Both are free as far as the need to make a character talk with out having to start from scratch building stuff in Blender but once again there is the learning curve to tend with.

So no starting from scratch is not a requirement or necessary. For example

Could not find an example for G8 or G9
If you are interested in Metahuman you have options as well

Sorry for the hard love but a negative response is a good way to shut down a topic. A better approach is just to say you will look into it, or say you already have but does not fit your needs, and the refine your question as in the idea you want to practice as a means to learn and I’m sure you could motivate a conversation as there are no fixed pathways to this chaotic art form :wink:

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Ok, Let me refine my question then. :smiley:

As a beginner, I need to see the complete process/workflow, from A to Z in order to get the idea. You know, from rigging a character (my character let’s say I bought from Unreal’s Marketplace, not from DAZ neither from Mixamo), animations, then setting up the morph targets, then exporting all these to unreal and finally how to trigger them inside Unreal ( I think I have a very good understanding regarding animations so far, and the process from blender e.g. to unreal).

But, if a tutorial is showing only the rigging part, then another tutorial is showing only animations, and then another one the morph targets part and so on, this process can be very confusing because in each tutorial, you know each instructor does things in different ways and as a beginner it’s very difficult for me to combine all these steps together and proceed.

I don’t know If all these sound negative, but you get my point, 99% of tutorials out there are for blueprints (and that’s fine, that’s how I learned blueprints myself), but when you get to the point regarding facial expressions and all that, which is crucial in order to develop something decent, you 're starting to feel helpless.

Nevermind, TorQueMoD posted a link for a blender to unreal morph targeting workflow, so I think I’ll try and go from there and see what happens. :smiley:

So if I’m reading right your more interested in the design logic and not so much about what buttons to push to get the desired result?

I agree to me a much more complete logic map is of more value as to how the buttons work as there are as you say plenty of tutorials that covers the individual nuts and bolts. There is noting that I know of that puts forward the need of developing a design logic as to how all the different parts can be combined as to the logic of the desired output. This tends to lead to information over here and over there that on describes how to make practical use of a function that is beyond the scope of a forum such as this one.

In most part this is because design logic is a common requirement of a lot of different products and not just related to video games and the need to extrapolate basics concepts in a manner that best fits your need of making all of the things you mentioned in a manner that makes sense to you.

Step one to figure it all out is to first understand the difference between top down bottom up workflows as understanding the direction your heading will help you to figure out what you need to do, or learn.

So based on what I assume is your question you are working in the top down direction and as described in the video you need to figure out what it is that your project is required to do.
My opinion as to a good starting point top down would be to set up the logic using a flowchart before you you put anything into the computer.

Using this as part of the top down will give you a better idea of how the bits and pieces fit together and at what point to wedge the need for what the actor needs to talk.
Once you have the design flow figured out you can then switch to bottom up as to the requirements needed to full fill the requirements. This is how I tackle the need to “just make it work” and from there “iterate” as to what needs to be done to get the result I’m looking for.
You don’t see a lot in this area as the completed design is based on iteration of the smaller problems with no or little idea of how it would or could be accomplished using the individual parts. It’s a case of knowing it can be done even if you don’t know how and for the most part difficult to explain with out first establishing the top down requirements.
Hope this helps at at least setting a direction but is overlooked as a game design requirement as design approaches is it’s own thing and there is plenty on Youtube as to design theory that applies to game design.