making the blendshapes affect attached meshes

[lcairco]

So when you're in MakeHuman, when you apply something like a viseme or a facial expression, the meshes attached to your human deform along with the human's body. For example, raising the eyebrows causes the eyebrow mesh to move; opening the mouth causes the teeth to move, etc. I assume this is because they are handled the same way as clothing--with their positions being stored as offsets from a set of vertices or faces.

Once the blendshapes are exported out (in FBX), however, all the meshes are separated out and the blendshapes only affect the body mesh. Does anyone know whether it might be possible to export it in such a way that the other meshes are affected as well, as they should be?

Thanks!

[duststorm]

You are correct. Within MH all those proxy meshes are fitted to the basemesh, and updated when the basemesh is modified.
Blender does not apply such fitting, and to my knowledge there is such option available in it.

For skeleton rigs we solve this problem by vertex weighting proxy objects to the same skeleton, but for blendshapes I don't think there is an easy solution.
We could export matching blendshapes for each proxy object, but it would probably be hard to manage in Blender, and not very portable.

Perhaps this is another reason why we should push forward with a skeletal face animation system in A9. If blendshapes are only used for small skin accentuations, the proxies will probably be fitted well enough just using the skeleton.
A8 currently has blendshape export disabled because there are a few problems with it that remain unresolved.

[lcairco]

Yes, a skeletal face animation system would be nice.

I'm trying to use these characters right now for lipsyncing so I've been trying to make modifications in the source to get those visemes out for the basemesh along with the proxy meshes and have been struggling to get anywhere with that. Exporting to FBX, the basemesh blendshapes work fine (just had to poke around in the source long enough to figure out how to enable that export) but without the proxies moving it's pretty useless. I've been attempting to implement your second approach, exporting blendshapes for every proxy, but no success yet. I guess I'll keep chipping away at it until a new animation system comes out!

Thanks for your help!

[brkurt]

Yes, a skeletal face animation system would be nice.

I'm trying to use these characters right now for lipsyncing so I've been trying to make modifications in the source to get those visemes out for the basemesh along with the proxy meshes and have been struggling to get anywhere with that. Exporting to FBX, the basemesh blendshapes work fine (just had to poke around in the source long enough to figure out how to enable that export) but without the proxies moving it's pretty useless. I've been attempting to implement your second approach, exporting blendshapes for every proxy, but no success yet. I guess I'll keep chipping away at it until a new animation system comes out!

Thanks for your help!

I'll have a completed 'Gina Carano' model with a 27-bone facial rig in Blender 2.69 later today for your testing if you wish.

I wanted to use the latest mesh (A8RC1) with only bones and vertex groups (no envelopes and no shape keys). You can then create the shape keys yourself.

My approach is that one viseme = one pose. That way, special shape keys related to emotional responses can be added separately.

[lcairco]

Well it turned out to be reasonably straightforward to export out the shapekeys with the proxy meshes so I'll probably stick with that! I guess I just needed a good night's sleep to be able to make sense of the code and get the function calls right.

But I'd still love to see your facial rig and would be glad to share the modifications I made to get those shapekeys out!

[brkurt]

Well it turned out to be reasonably straightforward to export out the shapekeys with the proxy meshes so I'll probably stick with that! I guess I just needed a good night's sleep to be able to make sense of the code and get the function calls right.

But I'd still love to see your facial rig and would be glad to share the modifications I made to get those shapekeys out!

Here you go: http://www.geekopolis.ca/blender/completed_models/ginaCarano1_269.blend

and here is a close-up video:

http://vimeo.com/86038666

[ThomasL]

Yes, in a face rig using blendshapes, the shapes must also affect some proxy meshes, in particular eyebrows and eyelashes. This is not done today, but the code exists. Before expressions were removed, they did affect the full body proxy meshes.