I’m prevaricating on having voice acting in my game, at least ‘real’ voices, was maybe thinking more kinda simlish or the random gibbery nintendo style, but having a really strong manager for expressions would be brilliant, particularly with the workflow i mentioned above - the daz fbx exporter can easily supply various specified expressions as morph export rules too and being able to blend those in and maybe create triggerable macros and wotnot to automate them would be a godsend
Maybe out of your remit but to me, a cert buy, without a doubt - i think a formula of: create an expression definition, add the blendshapes for the expression(s) and their blending amount each, there being more than one blendshape possible for ‘custom’ expressions that the speech blendshapes could be modified by (to so some percent?), and that triggerable… heaven
Supplying the blendshapes is made extremely easily by daz studio and daz3d’s art used to be laughable and intractible for games, but now you can use it even as an in-game body customisation system with blendshapes it seems worth plugging, perfect marriage with something like this. I’d imagine you COULD update to include visemes etc but i neednt see the exact reason, if you add customisable expressions that are additive then you can modify the speech blendshapes by script or if youre feeling brave, some anim editor or curves then you can blend in lip movement and everything else to the speech without messing with the core system.
That is just an idea however, chances are with the next ‘payday’ as such coming along, it’s a buy, i just do hope you keep updating this software as it offers a great deal in a really nice straightforward way
We have been discussing expressions outside the existing four speech shapes since the beginning, and we have a design plan that should allow an unlimited number of expressions that function independent of the speech shapes.
SALSA for 3D, and RandomEyes for 2D/3D already expose [Blend Speed] and [Range of Motion] options, so any expression system we would build would likely include similar type of control. We have worked very hard to make the system as easy to use as possible, with the smallest amount of requirements, while still exposing powerful programmatic control over it. We even built and included the basic dialog system that is used in the online demo scene so we could run the system through its paces and demonstrate one approach to a real-world implementation.
This doesn’t get you integrated expressions today, but I hope it shows our commitment to the product.
Thanks for the reply, sounds perfectly fine! Facial animation may be a bit further on for me anyways, hence i havent got this yet, but even now it wouldn’t be too hard to make a little thing that did what i described myself, it would just be a bit of a bodge job and only suit my project. So no worries, nothing expected this instant, but i’ll probs grab this sometime soon anyways just to make development more fun if nothing else (mute characters with little animation to no animation while communicating isnt very enthusing to work with). Cheers
I think Chris West’s MegaDAZ is needed because typically you need to decimate the character, export without the morphs, and then use MegaDAZ to import the needed morphs. As I need MegaDAZ to import Poser CR2s not the newer DAZ Genesis format I haven’t tested this.
If I were to PM you could you take a look at a comple of older CR2 format files for me? I’ll put them in a drop box. As of you, I’ve not seen an model in the asset store with blend shapes
Well I have a simple game that needs the expressions more than the speech for now so maybe I can ‘lie’ and send expression blend shapes instead of speech blend shapes until you have finished.
…but that requires me getting CR2 morphs imported into an fbx and working…
I’ve got a bit of v4 and m4 stuff, no worries, i’ll test them out now, but i’d genuinely ask you to consider Genesis instead, it’s a notable move upwards in flexibility and quality. Still the usual gamut of blow up doll costumes for the lonely people but a lot of really strong art and lovely lovely blendshapes. Where i post the results is up to you but it’s something that’s worth being common knowledge right now (particularly any differences between cr2 and the Genesis format)
To the thread author, don’t worry, not off-topic, as far as I can tell, Daz is easily the best place to get decent affordable stock with blendshapes, modelling them can be a pain and generally far more expensive in money-hours
Oh my are toon style characters. The licenses were expensive in total, over $500…they were licenses directly from the artist not DAZ. I’ll PM you the link. I have an ideal for a game that I can program in one week (not counting the time to release it) I want to make.
Bloody hell, you money to spare! aha, no i understand when you’ve invested a lot and it proves to be a pain in the arse
I did own megadaz, im in the process of a refund as chris wests stuff is great (i have megafiers and megashapes), but mega daz is pretty irrelevant for at least genesis stuff now. PM me I guess, i’ll look into it
You should think about mileage! There’s toon morphs for genesis that are pretty affordable… although then again some aspects of these morphs i dont know how to export, like the mcms (morph controlling morphs) i have no idea how to link up in max etc so some very exagerated full body morphs relying on normal person shaped morphs through an mcm look a bit odd
I think you misunderstand how DAZ Game licensing works. Those DAZ prices only entitle you to use those characters as 2D sprites (very doable for some characters) and not as 3D meshes included in a released game. And certainly not for resale as a standalone mesh. To use DAZ in a game it costs $500. Of course you don’t need to pay for the license until you see if you can actually get them to work and release the game to the public, something I should have done with what I licensed.
Example: There is a Chibi Girl Boy that I really like but that would be $500 to DAZ for their license (the Genesis base mesh) + whatever the man that make them wants for his male female. He might not even want to license his characters outside of thee 2D DAZ advertising print world.
What I need to figure out is out to access the morphs from the CR2 once exported from DAZ Studio as an FBX that I licensed as that has plenty of cartoon characters I can generate from the morphs…perhaps it’s time I try to give the UMA base meshes a cartoon look by re-texturing them.
@goat
What you are describing would potentially be possible using RandomEyes. It does not require an audio file to be linked in and does have independent, programmable access to call each slot. You would have to call them by the intended action tho. So, if you loaded a smile into the lookUp slot, you’d have to call it using the lookUp designation. That would give you 4 slots to load, 5 if you count the blink slot, but it is a timed slot.
Thanks, I think I could load blank audio files too. I’ll buy something this week if I can figure out how to get morphs exported with the CR2 in the FBXes otherwise it’ll be another week or two while I get another model source…
SALSA may be more difficult to work with in that respect since it’s main goal is to analyze a waveform and map to the appropriate shape key. RandomEyes is definitely the one to use for this. In fact, the new custom shape key system will be added to RandomEyes, since they share a lot of the same underpinnings. FWIW, making shape keys in Blender is pretty easy. I’ve started working on a video tutorial today, demonstrating how the Boxhead shape keys were put together for the asset. Will prob have it completed in another day or two. If you’re just making expression shapes for toon characters, they should be pretty easy to do. I guess that’s all relative, depending how many models you’re using and how many expressions they should have.
Short story: Poser stuff decimates and exports just fine via Daz Studio.
Longer: You’ll need to clean the model up somewhere, Blender’s probably fine, just Daz models always seem to be broken up into a ton of mat ids that need condensing and fixing the object names would make it nicer to work with too
Unless the clothing you’re using has the same blendshapes as your base mesh, it wont follow your base mesh, so in a case like that have your body shape set in daz studio before export. The Genesis stuff i’ve used has always been pretty flexible with this but what i worked with in poser’s formats wasn’t so with the clothing i gave it. This might be a rare case though.
In short though, if you’re motivated by the idea of an asset like this, it’ should be very functional with the kind of products you’ll find at www.daz3d.com and similar so if the licenses dont scare you and the idea of making your own blendshapes does, you have a huge resource there. And randomeyes implementing expression blendshapes (or any blendshape on the model) sounds great, especially if there’s some nice level of control. You could count me in.
Thanks a lot for your help, as it so happens the clothing, hair, and accessories do conform and there is a decent size library too. I do want to learn to model and I have somewhat but I want to use what’s I’ve licensed as well. They can be used in different niche games.
Feature request time! Is it possible that instead of using the 4 positions you be able to supply a good set of visemes instead? I don’t know how more complicated or less complicated that makes things for you but the visemes are quite easy to get with daz’s Genesis model system and seem comprehensive
