Hello,
I am struggling to have any consistent success with the Humanoid/Custom Mesh workflow and Morph targets, for a hybrid bone + morph workflow (jaw, tongue and eyes are bones, everything else is blendshape/morphs.)
I’ve watched every tutorial I can find find on the Humanoid face process: the obj workflow (not useful for this setup,) the fbx sequence workflow (what should be ideal) and a couple of masterclasses that use the fbx sequence (pig dude and mouse person.) In all of them, the CC>Blender>CC round trip “just works.” I can get working morphs from Obj and FBX (non sequence) but neither of these give me the bone + morph control I need.
For me, it’s a literal roll of the dice and I’ve been trying now for days and found no rhyme or reason to when it works and when it doesn’t. I have tried it in Max, Maya and Blender.
Max and Maya just didn’t work at all. Blender seems to be the best supported workflow and the sculpting tools are nice for morphs but I can’t get consistent results when re-importing to CC. Specifically, it won’t register most of the shapekeys I’ve created. The ones dropped could be mesh keyed or bone keyed. I have found no consistent logic to it and am at my wit’s end.
I’m pretty familiar with 3d art and I get how blendshapes work/what not to do etc. What I don’t get is how CC decides where or not to acknowledge a morph. My assumption would be that it looks for Bone Rotation and/or either key data on the mesh’s shapekey channels or a difference in the vert positions.
TLDR I need “FBX with sequence” to work consistently and reliably. I want to understand how CC decides if there’s a morph target or not and I need a reliable process to iterate on morph data between Blender and CC.
More info:
-SOME of the morph targets show up and work so the mesh didn’t break. Some don’t. Doesn’t matter if bone or mesh.
-The characters I’m trying to get working are made of multiple meshes, which is the big difference from the talking wolf tutorial. But the other two videos are multi-mesh characters. They just don’t cover the details.
-The characters I’m trying were not rigged with accurig (this shouldn’t matter, right?!)
-I am turning off “add leaf joints” when I export to Blender
-I am using the CC/Blender hot-link plugin and it’s cool but haven’t found how/if it works for humanoid morph data.)
Specific questions:
- How does CC decide if a frame in an FBX sequence is a morph or not?
- How are we supposed to handle blendshapes across multiple mesh objects (body, teeth, eyes, clothes etc.) Video tutorials show both but gloss over how to do the custom shapes. If we want to add “91_StinkFace” to the body mesh and “92_EyeDialate” to the eyeballs, should the eyes have a blank channel 91 and the body a blank channel 92?
- Do all the meshes need to be keyed at a value or 1 for the base 90 morphs to properly register or is CC only looking for different vertex positions?
- Lastly, and this is assuming I can get this working, how/can we do we do inbetween morphs so that for example, a blink can appear to roll over an eyeball and not linearly cut right through it?
- (metaphorical) Why doesn’t it just read every frame’s vert and bone positions against the frame sequence map and use those as the morphs whether they move on that frame or not? Then it would always work unless the model itself changed.
My guess is that CC is trying to do something really clever in a black box but defaulting to not working + no error messages instead of working.
I’m at my wits end with the promise of this software and the reality of using it. The mocap tools in iClone are great but I bought CC because it looked to make rigging production-ready characters with facial animation easy. Now I’m wasting a lot more time than I thought I’d be saving.
Sorry for the long post. I don’t know a short way to explain.