I got the new Maya Livelink feature working great with Maya 2018 and UE4 4.19, but it’s only streaming the skeletal mesh bone animation data. Is it possible to stream the Maya blendshape slider data to UE4 also or not at all?
For example, my avatar uses Maya Blendshapes for facial animation. I can see all the Morph Targets in the Morph Target Preview tab in UE4 so I know the avatar is setup identically on both ends, but UE4 isn’t picking up the Blendshape animation keys I set in Maya.
In the video you can see realtime facial animation that is then exported via FBX to Maya, where I’m using a proxy rig with 52 joints named after each blend shape, connected to each morph target in UE4, so that every time a blend shape is active( value from 0 to 1 ) the correspondent joint on the “proxy rig” is moved on the Z axis ( value from 0 to 1 ).
I’m using sequence recorder to record the skeletal animation, then when imported into Maya I’m using a Set Driven Key script that apply a retargeting from those proxy rig joints to the Blend Shape facial rig.
I guess you can do the opposite, meaning that in Maya you can have the Blend Shape facial rig driving the proxy rig joints, then in UE4 you can create a BP setup where the proxy rig joints value are driving the Blend Shape rig, so that you can have a realtime link between Maya and UE4, using a hack to drive the blend shape facial rig.
Not sure if anyone has posted a solution to this, but I took @Enter_Reality’s suggestion and developed a blueprint using their idea. We made a bunch of joints with names that match our blend shape/morph target names and mapped the blend shape transforms to those joints so that they move between 0 and 1 on the Y-axis. Then I made an array with all of those names and pulled them into a For-Each loop that takes that transform info and applies it to the morph target of my character. Works in real time!
