Hi,
I purchased the Maya plugin for FaceFX and am playing around with the trial of Maya 2011.
I have a character I created in Evolver.
My goal is to get a custom audio playing in Unity with my custom evolver character but I can't get past the Maya Plugin step properly.
I downloaded the Source Data for $70 from Evolver and loaded it in maya. I made sure to select Darwin Skeleton and Facial Bone Rig.
I then opened the Maya Plugin by selecting FaceFX.mel
I hit Export under the "reference pose" section in my new actor file I created in the FaceFX Maya Plugin Window. I made sure first that I as on frame 0 of the animation of my Evolver character.
I then selected all the bones in the scene hitting shift on the + sign to expand all the bones and shift select to select them all.
The next step was to hit Batch-Export (like I said I am using Unity) so I used the Batch-Export.txt file in the Unity demo file folder. That loaded up.
I have an audio file .wav of a person recording and a text file with the text of the audio to match and load that when I hit generate animation in the Animations panel.
I then select the animation and hit clean and import to see the animation in Maya. I have done this testing with the slade animation to see my custom audio bit/lip sync animation.
The mouth and gestures do NOT move at all on my Maya Evolver Character. I feel like this step is messing up the facefx file which meses up the xml file for Unity and the rest of the pipeline.
Can someone please tell me how to properly get the bones/facial animation/lip syncing working in the Maya Plugin from a Evolver character. I see the facial bones and everything they just don't move.
I feel like once I get past this step the rest is gravy. I have watched all the tutorial videos many times. I don't know what I am missing.
Thanks in advanced!
- Matt
You are also posting questions here, which might be the better place given that the problems are in the Unity integration:
http://forum.unity3d.com/threads/78076-New-FaceFX-Integration-With-Unity
I think you are past this point now, but it sounds like you were "Batch Exporting" bone poses without any bone poses in your timeline. That won't work. When you batch export bone poses, you need to have the bone poses in the Maya timeline at the frames that are specified in the batch export script.
The Unity integration lets you import another character's bone poses onto your character, provided they have the same skeleton setup (yours should work with evolver facial bone rig and darwin default skeleton). Just make sure the scale factor setting in the FaceFX controller matches the scale factor of your FBX file when you import the XML actor file so the FaceFX bone poses are at the same scale as your character.