How To Stop Facial Animations On Athena Body

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If yous have multiple characters in your project that are similar and share the same Skeleton Asset, yous may desire to consider using curve driven animations for facial expressions. When doing then, you can share thoseanimation curves and drive them with Pose Assets to produce your desired facial expressions and fifty-fifty share them across multiple Skeletal Meshes.

One important caveat however is that your animation must non have whatever bone transform data inside it. Whatsoever bone transform data, fifty-fifty with one mesh's reference pose, won't work for other meshes so it is important to remove os transforms (keeping just curves) and start with each mesh'due south own reference pose if you desire to share the curve between different meshes. This enables you to share the facial curves between different faces.

The following is an case workflow, your workflow may differ based on your assets and desired results.

Create and Apply a Primary Skeleton

The commencement thing you will want to do is to import a base Skeletal Mesh and create a Skeleton Nugget that will be considered every bit your Master Skeleton (which every other Skeletal Mesh that you lot want to share facial animations with will utilise). Any additional meshes that y'all import should have the same bone hierarchy and naming convention in order to share the Skeleton asset.

Delight see the Skeleton Avails documentation pages for more information on Skeletons.

Create a Pose Asset

The next affair you will want to practice is inside your DCC, bake out your poses to an FBX sequence and import the FBX into Unreal Engine. This volition give y'all an Animation Sequence containing each of the curves at their min/max blend values.

Click image for full view.

Above, our imported blitheness sequence contains all curves and their max values at a given frame.

Once you have imported your sequence containing all your curve data, you can create aPose Asset from that animation sequence which can be used to translate the animation bend data into actual facial animation on the grapheme.

You tin can right-click on an Animation Sequence and create a Pose Asset from it from the context bill of fare.

Inside your Pose Asset, you lot volition need to define the Pose Names by inbound in each proper name manually or by copying and pasting data stored from your clipboard.

Here we accept a list of all the poses identified in our 58 frame blitheness sequence containing our poses that we imported:

We can then apply these as the names of our poses in our Pose Nugget:

Y'all will and so see these curves in the Anim Curveswindow which is stored forth with the Skeleton Nugget.

Click prototype for full view.

Every graphic symbol that uses the Main Skeleton would then have access to these curves and can bulldoze their own facial blitheness past the different values represented in each curve while the Pose Asset translates all of the curve data to the actual animation pose the grapheme takes.

Above, we changed the default value of the jaw_open_pose from 0 to 1 resulting in the character opening its oral fissure.

When inbound your Pose Names inside the Pose Asset, it is by and large a good idea to delete unused curves from theAnim Curveswindow to minimize the corporeality of unused curves from being displayed.

Below in our Pose Asset we tin can see all of our Pose Names which are as well displayed in the Anim Curves window:

When we modify Pose_0 to l_eye, Pose_0 remains every bit a curve in the Anim Curves which we tin delete by correct-clicking on it and selectingDelete Bend.

Institute Parent/Child Animation Blueprints

Once you have a Pose Nugget, you'll want to create an Animation Blueprint for your character that utilizes a curve driven animation, and finally, aPose Nugget node (assigning your Pose Asset) to correctly translate the bend data into poses the character can use.

Click image for full view.

If y'all plug the curve driven blitheness directly into the Final Blitheness Pose, the Animation Pose will not now how to translate the curves into pose data. This is where the Pose Asset node comes in and intercepts the animation, properly translating the curves into actual pose data that the character can utilise.

When y'all have additional characters, if yous create and assign them Kid Blitheness Blueprints from this Master Animation Blueprint, yous tin override the Pose Asset with unique Pose Asset information for each graphic symbol. This allows for the character specific deltas to exist accomplished, ensuring that a scream for case looks correct on varying proportions.

Click image for full view.

Above nosotros accept an additional grapheme that is using a Kid Animation Pattern based on our Master.

Inside our Child AnimBP, we have overridden the Pose Asset to use one that is specific to this character, enabling us to use the deltas to drive facial poses specific to this character and the blitheness that is played comes from our parent.

Bringing In Animations

When you offset to bring in facial animations for your characters, typically y'all'll desire some body blitheness that is driven by bones in the graphic symbol in addition to the curve driven facial blitheness. In social club to share trunk animations just drive facial animations through curves, you volition need to remove whatsoever Bone Tracks from the facial animation leaving only curves or use an Animation Modifier to remove specified Bone Tracks and drive curves for the confront.

How would this work? For example, accept the Animation Sequence below:

Our Blitheness Sequence contains all the curves and keyed values for those curves representing varying facial poses. The problem however is that the curves would also exist playing on superlative of any bone driven animations which would result in double transforms and incorrect results. In this case you lot would want to remove those Bone Transforms, leaving simply the curves.

You can Remove All Os Tracks from the Nugget card under animation:

You can also employ Animation Modifiers to remove certain bones only if you want to share body animations but drive curves for the face. Typically you'll want to have a os driven trunk animation, but bend driven facial animations in which case we opted to use an Animation Modifier.

Here the Animation Sequence and specified Bone Track to remove (include its children) are finalized when the modifier is applied.

You can create an Animation Modifier by creating a Blueprint with the Parent Grade set to Animation Modifier.

On any animation that your import, you can go into the Animation Modifiers section and so apply the Animation Modifier that you have created to remove Bone Transforms.

After adding the Animation Modifier, you tin can and then click to Employ the modifier.

With only the curves remaining, you can run the animation through a Pose Asset inside your Animation Blueprint to give yous the curve driven pose that can be shared. Below, nosotros connect our curve driven blitheness directly up to the Final Blitheness Pose, however the pose is non used as it does not know how to handle the curves. Nosotros so connect it to the Pose Asset to drive those curves which results in the character performing our facial expressions.

Each of our characters since they are using a Child Animation Blueprint and their own assigned Pose Asset can now share the facial animation using their relative deltas. Since we do non have bone transforms and the animation is purely driven past curves, we are not seeing double transforms and can blend this with whatever additional bone driven animation data (such as full body animation).

Source: https://docs.unrealengine.com/5.0/en-US/facial-animation-sharing-in-unreal-engine

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