Hi!
I have a problem using FaceFX studio to manage my body animation.
I use the @animation workflow. I do have a clean base.fbx which contains just the character wit NO animation applied.
Next I have a base@facefx_poses, which works nicely for the lipsync. )face animation is all blendshapes, head movements skeletal animation.
I then have a base@idle file, which has a skeletal animation only, for the characters Idle animation.
Finally I have a base@eyedarts animation which has is basically the base file, with a purely morph based eyedart animation loop, to add more life to the character.
Now as long as I only add the idle animation (as an event or via the preview dropdown) everything works as expected. Once I add the eyedart animation (which is in the default base pose and has no keys on the skeleton - although I have already tried it with setting keys or even deleting the body and skeleton) I get a blend between the idle animation and the base pose for as long as the eyearts are active.
It should just play the idle and make the changes to the face, because the pose on the eyedart animation is just the reference/base/skin pose.
What am I missing here? Any help is greatly appreciated!
I'm afraid that body animations brought in with the fbx@ syntax are not "additive" like normal FaceFX animations. So when the "idle" animation is playing at 100%, no other body animation can play. You can blend 50% idle with 50% eye-dart, but you can't have them both playing at 100% just because they are controlling different bones/morph channels.
Doing a morph-based eye-dart idle animation using FaceFX curves and nodes instead of fbx@ animations is totally doable however. Is there a reason you are using the FBX pipeline there?
Sorry for the late reply.
I am using the fbx workflow, because I want to add some variation to our animation. I want to have different captures idle sequences that blend together. On top I want a fairly simple eye dart loop to keep the character alive and ideally I would add another anim layer that would play head movement loops for events if possible... like nodding, shaking the head etc.
So the way I am seeing this is, I'd have to create an Idle animation including my eyedarts in one file ... then I'd have to animate all the head movement I want to apply complete with a variation of the idle loopand blend between those single full body animations?
I think what you want to do is set up your eye-dart animations, head movement animations, and head animations like nodding and shaking as FaceFX animations, and don't bother with exporting them as FBX animations. You can embed these FaceFX animations into other FaceFX animations from the events tab.
Then you would export your complete animation with lip-synch, eye-darts, head animations as one complete FBX file.
Would that pipeline work for you?
Yeah, I guess it should better work! I don't think I have another choice ;)
On a side note ... is it possible to bake an fbx animation to a faceFX animation? Like when I wanted to use mocap data for some of my head movement?
I guess once I have the animations insinde of face FX I should be able to have them triggered by an analysis actor? Or build my own, including the animations?
No, it is not possible to bake an fbx animation to a facefx animation. Once you bake out an animation to FBX, the animation data is stored as bone transforms, and there is no going back to curves for targets.
Once the eye dart animations are in FaceFX, yes it would be possible to trigger them with an analysis actor. Or you can just add the eye dart animation as an event to your other animation.