I’ve been finding my ways around with Metahumans and they’re really cool to work with, however there’s something that I haven’t found out and that is how do I export face control animation to maya? From maya I know that’s how I save out the anim to load onto the character in UE (via fbx), however whats the solution if you want to export anim to maya for clean up, tweaking or just exchanging anim?
Thankful for your answers
Btw. I’ve done a couple of videos to document my journey with metahumans so far:
Great videos, hate Vimeo. Can’t post any comments as want me to verify email and never get one, tried for months. Anyway, I need the same thing as I have a baked facial animation in unreal I want to bring into maya to refine, so hopefully someone has the answer. I can’t find any documentation anywhere.
I’m trying to figure out the same thing. I appreciated the tip in your livelink video about turning simulation on and then hit play. That helped me get livelink going in the viewport. I tried exporting the animation as an fbx from the take animation, but that did not export anything. I applied it to the BP in the sequence and then I could export an fbx with just a single node and the same when I baked the facial anim to the facial ctrls and exported. I have not found a way to export the animation and reapply it to the maya rig.
There’s no built in way to export sequencer keyframe data to FBX. However, users can extract the keys using Python to a JSON file. An example of that lives in the SequencerScripting plugin’s content folder.
Thanks for your reply @EpicChris ,
Do you think an easier transfer will be available at somepoint soon? In style with how you export the facial anim data from maya and load it onto the sequencer? I mean the lengths the team has gone through to think of something so simple and amazing just to hear that there’s no easy round trip? The folder you’re refering to is that in the metahumans sample project?
A live link face version for Maya would be very neat indeed! Great tip @tomsaw
Whilst it would be ideal to start in Maya at times I think UE should allow of multiple workflows.
I can see myself live streaming mocap to a take, then to put onto the sequencer for further enhancement or to send to maya. I can also see a non linear workflow (UNREAL ENGINE 4.26 (FALL 2020) - Unreal Engine Public Roadmap | Product Roadmap) where i put loads of anim clips onto the sequencer and line up with new tools, and if not perfect then send over to maya to do the last final bits etc.
That looks pretty neat @tomsaw
If there wouldn’t be an option to sort the face anim from ue to maya then it would be great to transfer keys through live link.
MetaHumen’s face rig is excellent. To make full use of it you need a good animation tool. Since MetaHumen is compatible with Maya it seems natural to do all animation in Maya. If someone knows this tool I don’t have to explain that it is much more advanced in animation than Unreal. Not only the face, the character animation could also be done in Maya. But for this you need a tool. Communication between Maya -Unreal should be easy.
Maybe Epic is thinking about it. Maybe other developers will solve it.
I think MetaHuman is so revolutionary that such a tool has to appear. This is the only way to realize the potential of MetaHuman.
