I’m facing somewhat of a struggle here. I have a character which works with Mixamo animations (an online service) which has Face Plus as a plugin to capture facial animation in Motionbuilder. See example here Face Plus for Motionbuilder 2014 - YouTube
My question is, I have a character set up in Maya with blendshapes, which i can bring into motionbuilder and use face plus… how in the world would i be able to transfer a facial animation with a body FBX animation from Motionbuilder into UE4?
I am not an avid C++ user, so i have been depending on Blueprints so far. But any help would be great.
Thanks everyone!
EDIT: just to be more specific about the question. My only concern here is making the recorded content from Face Plus available to use in UE4.
Make sure you have a skeletal mesh (which you do), once you have keyframed morph animation export the FBX and then all of the morphs/blendhapes should come in if you tick ‘Import Morphs’ and ‘Import Animation’ (I just tested this with C4D and it worked perfectly)
Hello . yes the blendshapes test works with me too. I know where my problem is now:
1- i have a skeletal mesh with morph targets in UE4 working
2- i have a body animation in maya with blendshapes animations for the face
3- if i export the body animation with the facial animation it means i am exporting another skeletal mesh. Won’t this replace my already created skeletal mesh in UE4?
[EDIT]: you know what sorry about that. just saw the unreal answers forum post link you posted. I will try this and update this thread in case of any complications. Thanks again, man.
Ok . Thanks so much. What i was confused about was that, when i use to export animations our of maya or motionbuilder, it was only the skeleton, and UE4 would import that as an Animation Sequence into the editor. I thought that bones were the only animations UE4 would accept.
To anyone looking for the solution, its pretty simple (also referring to the second link from 's reply).
import the Skeletal Mesh without animation to set up your character in UE4
when ready, simply animate the blendshapes in Maya/Motionbuilder (both worked), and export out the animated body and keyframed blendshapes by FBX, include the character geometry of course and the skeleton.
when importing into UE4, use the set up Skeletal Mesh you already have as the target, import morph targets and animation.
in persona, you can now see the animated body WITH the blenshapes animated as well.
MotionBuilder is a motion capture front end application that you can attach devices to as supplied by the device manufacture through the use of a constraint system. You can if you don’t have the device driver build your own but a bit to complicated to explain in a single post.
What’s confusing between the video tutorial and what you want to do is the video is based on the use of cluster or markers that directly drives the rotation and movements of the camera and does not use blend shapes. Side note there is no such thing as markerless MoCap even though you do not need the actor to be rigged with markers.
I’ll assume that you have the Mixamo device driver so that’s half of the job and the second half is a rig that uses the same rigging and naming convention and required bones. As luck would have it Mixamo uses almost the identical naming convention used in Motion Builder and if they supply you with character assets that matches the device requirement your ready to go and should be able to create any and all animations that you need.
Why it might not be working in a lot of cases is one did not complete the process required to send out animation if the need is to export the data to a different application. In this case Unreal 4.
As captured and recorded the data “stays” inside the device manager and is not directly plotted to the base rig as to the animations you wish to export. You can try exporting all day but it won’t work because the animations is in the device cache.
To send it out you must first “plot” the cached data from the device to the targeted clusters that is part of the main skeletal base and take the device driver off line. If you turn off the device and there is still animation then it was done right.
To send it out to FBX for import into Unreal 4 select the character in the character control panel that contains the animation takes that you want to send out and uncheck save character control rig and character extensions and select the take you want to export.
In Unreal 4 import as normal using the matched rig in UE4 as the target.
As a opinion I would recommend that one does not use morphing for facial animations as it’s footprint and performance curve growth is exponential. In other words all is good until you get to character 10 before you realize you have a serious problem.
then i used facepluse form motionbuilder2014 to record facial animation .
then i send it to maya 2015 to reexport it in .FBX 2014 to avoid texture problems in UE4
i had a problem with eyelashes animation it doesn’t move at all despite all other blending-shapes does…what’s wrong ???
