New way to import FACIAL animation, Diffeo or BVH retarget ?

[bouich jules]

Hi Thomas!

I remember you asked me if there any other way for facial animation, and that you can work to implement it!

i found a very good way, and it’s UE4 facial animation, used here by QUICKMAGIC https://www.quickmagic.ai/index/ it looks much much better and smoother.

Please find a sample of an UE4 rig with facial animation that is created by quickmagic in attachment, and do you think it can be added on the morph with facecaps/livelink or it should be added in BVH retarget?

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Thank you so much!

[Thomas Larsson]

We can use the same idea as in #1975: import the fbx file with Blender’s built-in fbx importer, and then transfer the facs animation from the imported face mesh to the target rig. There are now two new buttons in the Morphs > FACS panel:

• Copy FACS Animation: Copies from the selected mesh to the active rig.
• Import FACS From FBX File: Imports the fbx file, copies the facs animation from the imported face mesh, and deletes the imported objects again.

Unlike the facecap and livelink importers, these tools ignores the head movement, which is better handled by the bvh retargeter. To import the full animation in the fbx file:

1. Load and Retarget the fbx file with the bvh retargeter.
2. Import FACS from the same fbx file.

The New Action option should be disabled so the imported actions are combined. Or make two actions and push them down to the NLA editor.

There are problems with the collar bone poses, but that is nothing new. We can fix that (or at least reduce the problem) with the Edit Actions > Global Edit > Shift Animation tool. https://bitbucket.org/Diffeomorphic/retarget_bvh/wiki/Edit/Global/Shift Animation

It is a bit confusing to split the process over two plugins, but I wanted to leverage on the work already done with facecap and livelink. Perhaps all facs importers should be moved to the bvh retargeter, where they could be put in a separate panel called FACS.

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[bouich jules]

it's just AMAZING! thank you.