Hello,
I am going to be exporting over 100 morph shapes from max to FaceFX Studio. The Max Morph modifier is limited to 100 shapes and I was wondering if there is a way get around this by combining multiple exports, keying morph targets on time slider like bone example and recording morphs over time (I can do over 100 triggered morphs over time by scripting a new morph mod or using morphX), or combining actors in FaceFX? In Unreal workflow like this was a breeze since individual morph targets could be exported as individual psk files and appended to the morph target sets which the FaceFX workspace could tap into. I could not seem to get this working with the Ogre export options and the FaceFX Utility Plugin. Is there a way to export morphs individually or append a set already in FaceFX from Max?
Thanks,
Erik
The 100-target limit in Max will be difficult to get around.
As far as getting things into FaceFX's Ogre preview window, the Max Ogre exporter only supports the default Max morpher modifier. To support another would require code changes. It's open source, but that's still not ideal.
I don't think any of the other Ogre Max exporters (OgreMax is the main one) support other morpher modifiers.
We are working on an FBX pipeline, but short of stitching things together by hand using the text output version, it won't help that much.
The only way I can think of is to bring things into another animation package like Maya and export from there, but once again that's not ideal.
Once you have things in FaceFX, if you want to get the generated animation data back into Max, you will need to use the FaceFX plugin's maxscript interface to get the curves out and somehow apply them onto the correct targets. The FaceFX plugin once again only works with the default morpher modifier, but the maxscript interface is robust enough that this shouldn't be a big deal.
At the end of the day, the 100-target morph limit in Max is difficult to get around and there is no easy solution currently. We will keep it in mind however and do our best to improve the pipeline moving forward.
Thanks for the quick response. We will try maya for now. An fbx pipeline that supports importing and appending single or multiple morph targets to an existing facefx actor would be awesome. What purpose does the facefx actor export serve aside from sending a morph target list to facefx? Just trying to get my head around how the pipeline works since it seems way different from unreal facefx vs studio. It seems like any individual changes in morphs for studio requires a complete re-export of all targets that make up an actor and ogre file?
Thanks
Erik
.facefx files don't store the actual morph target vertex movements, only a face graph node that can drive the morph target in the preview game engine. This works the same way with UE3 and Ogre (UE3 has a special Face Graph node type for UE3 morphs however)
So the FBX pipeline that you mention that would let you append a single morph target with an FBX file would need to append the morph to an existing Ogre .MESH file. Then when FaceFX 2012 opens the .MESH file, it will detect the new morph target and import a node into the face graph for you.
> It seems like any individual changes in morphs for studio requires a complete re-export of all targets that make up an actor and ogre file?
If you change a morph target you need to re-export your ogre content to pick up the changes, but you don't need to touch the .facefx file.