Example 1, random cube, subdivided, rigged with an armature. randomly add a morph target, import. eveyrthing is fine. the morth shows up. all good.
Example 2, Complex mesh, rigged and weight painted to character. add a morph target, import… the base pose gets the morph applied. the morph target value doesn’t show up where it’s supposed to and after 3 hours at it I’m just going slightly crazier then normal.
Does anyone have any clue at what I need to look into? It doesn’t matter if in edit mode I delete the whole mesh and add a cube going with example 1 btw - the morph targets just don’t show up on this object…
On example 2, is not entirely clear what you mean.
You say that the base pose gets the morph applied, so it means that the morph is imported, but if you try to change the morph value nothing happens? or the morph value changes vertex where is not supposed to?
I know that most Maya/Max users added a very 0to1 animation on the morph target, to get at least the morph imported correctly.
oh, no I don’t even show a morph value at all. Not in the skeleton as a curve, not in the mesh as a Morph.
Been going over the FBX warnings and fixing it up. So far, I got rid of the issue with “influence over 8 bones” or whatever, without any change.
I have
LogFbx: Warning: Not valid bind pose for Pose (Mesh.000) - Node Body : The relative matrices do not match
LogFbx: Warning: Getting valid bind pose failed. Try to recreate bind pose
and
LogFbx: Warning: Bones digested - 192 Depth of hierarchy - 21
to check into… I doubt it will change my results at all…
No changes at all.
the morph export without coming in as options. if I key the animation in blender and move the frames along, the initial pose is modified by the morph, but I can’t change it or update it in game in any way…
After taking apart the exporter plugin I managed to figure out the issue.
Within blender, the morph targets are getting skipped if any of the transforms that you try and apply are invalid.
Applying the armature is an invalid action when you have morphs as they invalidate. this causes the first error.
the second error was thrown from the apply geometry under the mesh section.
The third error is in unreal. You won’t see the morphs come in on re-import. you have to actually close persona and re-open it…
About the third error, I always forgot to check the “Import morph target” option, so I usually open the SK and, in the import option, check the morph target box.
About Blender…well, I switched to Maya because of the compatibility, and as of now, even though I still find it very clumsy, it does import in UE4 straight away without dealing with all those issues.
Yea, I obviously agree. I mean, I had to make actual plugins myself for blender just to be able to work and export stuff properly.
Thing is, blender is very good at other things. On top of being 100% free and having 0 license restrictions, and I can pull the source and actually modify it if it comes to where I have to. Definitely can’t do that on Maya. Though I think the scripting powers are somewhat equivalent between the two.
Most importantly, Nvidia is releasing specifically updated studio drivers to improve blender performance… maybe maya doesn’t need the same specific updates because it had a better/more performant base, but I see this as a plus.
Either way, I’m glad i sorted it.
Now I just have to figure out if I should completely remove the facial bone structure and utilize the AR face morph specs… or leave the bones and re-weight paint because screw apple…
currently, I’m considering going the Kinekt way about this… I really only need very simple animations…
ARKit is a good compromise and efficient method to get facial animation done in very short time, all you need is a blend shape facial rig.
I think I’ll experiment a bit by using the blend shape values to drive a joint based rig as well, have some ideas but I need to develop the entire thing, possibly by the end of the year.
Anyway go with something that works…I spent so much time using Kinect or not that good hardware, that I then spent a huge amount of time fixing all the mocap issues, so if you can go for something that works out of the box, rather then a cheap alternative, it’ll help you a lot and you won’t be so stressed having to code your own thing
True, though usually I prefer coding my own thing, continuing at this rate I won’t even have the main character done before 2020…yet, the bone approach has its appeal.
As far as full mocap goes, I was seriously consideirng the rokoko suit, but the prices went up to the point I can now hire talent and a mocap studio for less then the cost of the suit. Kinda lame actually, but definitely less work considering 90% of the studios provide the cleaned up FBX or Editor ready files for you.
For now, BoneBreaker takes the edge off the pain of manually dealing with the animations/exports, and animating is definitely a good skill to pick up anyway - I’m finally at the point where I can cleanup mocap in minutes by just messing around with the curves out of having looked over enough data to know what areas of the curve will give issues. (Should I go the Kinect way for that, that’s likely a plus, but my main idea here would be to implement an 8point ps3 IR camera solution, it tracks better then any kinect; better tracking = less cleanup).
