Advice on facial animation with blendshapes AND bones

Questions & Answers
1

We have a project which needs a character to have a realistic animated face.
In max the character is skinned to a standard biped which has an extra bone for the jaw. I want this bone so that I can add nice asymmetrical movement.
The bulk of the facial expressions will come from morph targets/blend shapes however.
The problem we are having is that we can’t use Unity’s in-built animation clip function because there’s no way to scrub along with a sound file.
But we can’t do it in max because the morph target animations don’t carry over with the fbx.The morph targets themselves do but not the animation I apply in the timeline.

So in summary - we can either do the jaw bone animation in max but no morphs coming in.
Or I can try to animate the jaw and the morphs in Unity but without a sound file to work from. Which isn’t practical.

How does anyone else do this? Presumably I’m not the only person to have come up against this?

2

Hello,
I’ve a similar problem. My character have facial expressions driven by bones and the eyes blink driven by 2 shapes. When I import my FBX file in Unity, only the bones animation remains, the 2 shapes are ignored (I can’t even see the shapes in the inspector). Previously I worked with a character only driven by facial shapes (no jaw bone), and it was working fine.
So I’m wondering if Unity can manage 2 deformers (bones + shapes) on the same mesh ?
Thanks for letting me know where you’re at now.

3

@MikeErty I’ve come across this problem in the past.

I think the problem is that the key frames for the blend shapes/morphers are set on the mesh and if you export only the animation on the bones you loose the animation on the mesh.

Solution is when you export the animation have the mesh that contains the morphs selected and exported with the bones.