Facial animation workflow question

[devrich]

I hope everyone's projects are coming along smoothly! How is the plugin coming? Any news or updates? I'm very interested to see if it is ready yet! I would like to test it as soon as it is available!

I too would like to know if we can start looking forward to the plugin?

* Shamelessly adds a +1 for this *

[duststorm]

We still have no working exporter for animations that Blender accepts. This makes it impossible to export the face unit poses to Blender, which is holding up completion of the plugin.

[unity2k]

We still have no working exporter for animations that Blender accepts. This makes it impossible to export the face unit poses to Blender, which is holding up completion of the plugin.

[ThomasL]

We still have no working exporter for animations that Blender accepts. This makes it impossible to export the face unit poses to Blender, which is holding up completion of the plugin.

That's a strange statement. In the old newrig repo (https://bitbucket.org/ThomasMakeHuman/newrig/downloads) I exported a sequence of face unit poses with both collada and fbx, and the animation shows up in Blender. For fbx one has to convert the exported file to binary with AD's fbx converter, of course. The poses look a bit strange in the FBX converter but are fine in Blender.

[duststorm]

We first generalized the rig format to be able to define bone local orientations (rolls in blender) using data only, without hardcoded features. We tried to keep it as straightforward as possible so went with reference planes only.
The rig data format is accompanied by a blender importer and exporter. This took some time to set up but it is finalized now.

As for collada:
There is something strange with the collada animation export: the first posed bone works, the children of it have a wrong pose applied.
Probably the axes of the transformation change with the pose orientation of the parent, I'm still trying to figure out the exact math.
FBX at the moment only supports one animation track, it still needs to be modified to support multiple animations.

I also attempted a binary FBX exporter that works directly in blender, but there are still some issues with passing the bone matrices.

[aialexander]

Thanks, Duststorm, for the update! It's good to know that you guys are making progress despite hitting so many roadblocks. Thanks for being awesome!

[aialexander]

Any updates on how the plugin is coming along?

[duststorm]

Still need some more time to get everything sorted out.

[aialexander]

How is everything? Any new updates on the plugin's progress?