Ok, I want to know what software or how people are making in-game facial animations without using any morph targets. I have many enemies in my game that need just 1 expression I want to switch between the neutral expression to another one. How do I do this using 3ds Max??
I use facial bones. Even in a rig that used morph targets, I used a face cage and the vertexes drove the facial bones.
To animate the face separate of the body animation in Unity, I first tried putting facial animation on a higher layer and exported facial animations with no keys on the body. It worked, but it was difficult to export with Biped (which loves leaving at least one key on the bip) so I used additive animations, which work great as long as the body animations leave the face alone.
How do you rig facial bones?
For human faces I generally set up bones so their pivots are within the face and the ends lie on the surface of the face. If they’re placed well enough the natural arc will follow the face pretty well and you can do all your animation with rotations.
Hopefully you can tell what’s going on in this picture, but I’ve got two bones for the eyebrows, one for each eyelid (upper and lower) one for each eye, five for the mouth loop and one for the jaw.
Each is placed so the pivot of the bone gives a pretty good arc so when I animate the face I can drag their handles around and get effects like the corner of the mouth following the curve of the cheek etc.
The bottom three lip bones are parented to the jawbone and that and everything else is parented to the head bone.
Alternatively the bones just float at points on the face, and be moved and rotated freely. (I just prefer the arc approach when I can get away with it)
I’ve never seen anyone do this before, but I will definitely give it a try. Seems a lot better than morphing expressions.
For bones-based facial animation, FaceFX can generate animation data that can be imported into Max, Maya, XSI, MotionBuilder, or FBX format and from there it can go into Unity. You can download the evaluation of FaceFX and get your rigged character talking in it.
We will be introducing some affordable pricing for FaceFX products in the next month or two, so stay tuned.