How do I bind the Face (Expression/UI) controller to a different body mesh in Blender?

Pipeline Blender
1

I am using CC (5.03) and Blender (4.5 LTS), and the latest pipeline plugins for Blender. (CC/IC Link, etc)

My workflow is to create characters in CC, push them into Blender via the Send Avatar option, and then create Rigify rigs. I will do most animation and rendering in Blender.

I would like to create duplicates of the Body mesh that was imported from CC, so I can keep multiple body meshes bound to my rig for different situations. Mostly I want to use this to remove body mesh that breaks through clothing. For example, I have a character that in some scenes has a short-sleeve t-shirt, and in other scenes has a coat. Depending on the clothing configuration, I will use a different body mesh so I can remove parts that break through the different configurations.

However, I have found that that state of the CTRL_ bones associated with the Face (Expressions/UI) bone collections will only affect the shapekeys of the mesh that was imported from CC, not the duplicates I created in Blender. I haven’t yet figured out how the binding works between the CTRL_ bones and the shapekeys on the body mesh, but I would love to be able to switch that relationship to a duplicate of the body mesh if possible. Is this hard to do?

Thanks!

PS: I love the Face (Expression) and Face (UI) controller, and use it all the time.

2

Probably the safest thing to do is duplicate the body mesh after Rigifying. That way all the shape-key drivers are duplicated with it.

Duplicating the body mesh before Rigifying can confuse the Rigify process as it looks for a primary mesh object for the source of the facial expressions and it might use the wrong one.

Rebuilding the drivers in the Character Build Settings panel should fix it either way as it builds shape-key drivers for all relevant child meshes of the rig.

3

Thanks for the fast reply Victor. Your response gave me the insight I was missing. Here’s what I did to fix the issue:

  1. deleted the duplicated meshes
  2. verified that the Face UI controls were driving changes to the shapekeys on the primary imported Base_Body mesh.
  3. made new duplications from the Base_Body mesh
  4. verified that the duplicated meshes were also being controlled correctly

For additional context: I did the original mesh duplications after creating the Rigify rig, so that in itself shouldn’t be the cause. And I verified that the duplicated meshes had the correct shapekeys, and I rebuilt the drivers, but that still didn’t resolve the issue. However, the steps 1,2,3,4 above did fix it, so I’m back on track.

question: Do you have a process to report bugs on the Blender pipeline tools? I ask because I believe I found a performance regression on the “Live Sequence” method in Blender DataLink. I will see if I can get a clear repro case first, but exports that were taking about 6 minutes a couple weeks ago minutes are now taking 20+ minutes (same exact iClone file, same version of Blender, etc). I believe I installed a recent update to CC and iClone, so I suspect that’s related. However, let me get a repro case and I’ll circle back. If there is a process I should follow to report the issue & repro, please advise.

Many Thanks!

-Pat

4

That all depends where the bug is. If it’s a character or iClone bug it would need to be reported in the Feedback Tracker.

Bugs in the pipeline plugin or Blender add-on should be reported in the issues on the GitHub repositories:

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