Hello I am looking for fast pipeline for character creation rigging and facial animations for Unity5.
I was thinking about Fuze characters with their autoriging system , but it seams there is a problem with their facial blenshapes( blendshapes are not created even if the full version of fuze is used)
I was thinking about autodesk character creator as well but there is little less options for character customizacion.
wo what would be the best way to animate facial expresions? which software,pipleline. i have kinect 2v and good HD web camera.
i was aslo thinking about using iclone or Daz but i dont have any experiance with these…
i heard taht when comes to daz characters there is an additional 500$ fee for use in any video games.
For character creation - fuse characters look good as does autodesk characters. Daz characters always look - odd to me. Have you checked out makehuman?
For rigging, unless you are interested in spending money on mixamo, and also equally interested in the uncertainty associated with the adobe purchase of mixamo, their rigging for standard humanoid characters is probably the fastest thing you can get.
Alternatively here is a very interesting (free beta) software that seems to be a quality, fast rigging solution. https://www.nukeygara.com/
For facial animations, I personally wouldn’t suggest any solution that doesn’t use a standard bone setup. Morphs and blendshapes aren’t ‘retargetable’ onto multiple characters. However a standard bone setup for a face can be tweaked to fit most all faces, and once the animations are complete, just re-apply to another character, move around the bones to match the facial features, and you have a complete set of animations already created.
Speed is great for getting stuff done, but a better approach especially for characters, is a modular, streamlined workflow, that allows for re-usability. My opinion.
thank you for the response.
the whole version of Fuze has become recently free.(downloaded characters have no blandshapes)
I tried make human:) its a great tool for character creation with body and facial rigs but its lacking cloth library or cloth creator. I plan to cerate around 40 human characters in 2 weeks so making individual cloths for all of them is out of option.
if i have standard facial rig (bone based) what pipeline would you suggest to create facial animatnions?
faceware is kinda pricy for a small project and I will only have voice recordings of voice acctors. facial animations will have to be somehow faked. I was thinkin about voice lip synching+ neck, eyes,eyebrows recorded by kinect or webcamera+ then afterward tweeked a little bit manualy.
maybe sombody tried to make facial animaitons with this approche and knows what software pipeline would give the least headaches:)
I’m a traditional keyframe animator bosss so I don’t mess with those high tech gadgets - especially when I know I can get better ‘quality’ the more hands on I am. I create unique bone setups for characters and keyframe - like the old days.
But if I was doing something similar to you with a high number of characters, I think I’d still do the same process. Create a base bone set to cover all characters facial animation points. Use this bone setup for all characters.
Anyway - I think @TonyLi may be able to give you some better/additional advice.
I believe he has worked on several productions that have multiple characters that need facial animations created.
Like @theANMATOR2b says, one standard facial rig is definitely the way to go. Since you’ll only have voice recordings of your actors, don’t try to sync it with your own webcam/Kinect recording. You’ll never get it to match up quite right. Instead, generate the expressions procedurally. You’re right that true phoneme-mapping software like FaceFX is expensive, but SALSA is a much less expensive lipsync approximator. It has slightly lower fidelity, but you can mask this with lots of facial expressions, eye movement, camera movement, and body language. It also has the easiest workflow. Once you get your rig set up (and the developer has a lot of good tutorials for this), you can play any voice recording without any extra processing. I’m not getting paid to promote SALSA or anything; it just sounds like the best match for what you’ve described.
thx a lot . I’ll try SALSA . I dont plan to have a lot of closeups so the lipsync approximator might be enought.I’ll post risoults later on.BIG THX for your time and knowlage
Here a view of the coming Character functions in iClone
Furthermore, with iClone, you not only create character, also you have a motion studio, with facial expression and Lipsync(bone and morph based), Mocup files and Kinect …and it seems in the future neuron , too
It export all your stuff with 3D xchange (iC addon) to Unity
I have zero experience with iclone therefore it wasn’t a suggestion in my original reply.
Looks pretty good - except for ‘P’.
I’d like to see the pipeline into Unity bringing in the hair and cloth animations without complication. But for base humanoid characters it looks live a viable option.
Take a look at this thread . Their approach is quite different from others. It might be exactly what you wanted.
From my trial of their free version, you should be able to get the 3D-facial-animation done quite easily, since there is no need for rigging, morphing and key-framing, and you can always stay within Unity.
