Facial bones from Blender to 3DXchange (then to Iclone)

Dear Unity users,

actually this might not be the forum to ask this question, however, since there are a lot of Unity users that are a lot more experienced then me with this subject, I thought to give it a go.

I followed the Tim Burton series by David Ward, to be able to make my own model in Blender and export it to Unity. The rigify skeleton however, didnt match with Mecanim (problem with the head) so I made a more simple skeleton on my own and that did the job

But now I need my facial animations aswell in Unity. To achieve this I already have had some help from @MoHoe. But now I got to the point where I am stuck. In the Tim Burton series part 16, Ward tells us how to make shape groups and make a facial Rig, eventually parent it to our standard rig, or to explain better: make it one. Ok, so I thought I would be good to go and use 3Dxchange, Iclone and in the end Unity. Problem is now, that my facial bones do not work in 3DxChange: they are there, but they dont turn the facial mesh at all, nothing happens What I suspect, is that this has to do with Ward's set-up. He makes the shape groups, then the bones and lastly he makes shapes for the face, to control the face shapes via the bones. I gues this doesnt work for 3dXchange, the bones and names are all there but they dont do anything. So my question is: how can I make this work? How can I get the same result that I get in Blender? Delete the shapes maybe? But then they dont work anymore. Guys, I am lost, please... if someone could help me out, I would be more then glad.

Greetings,

Maurice

 

The tutorial you are following uses ShapeKeys for the facial animation, Unity does not currently support ShapeKeys (aka blendshapes or morphs) though some facial blendshape support for Mecanim is due in 4.3. If you need to use ShapeKeys now then you will need to use one of the packages from the Asset store that adds that functionality, seeing as you are using blender I would suggest MegaFiers as it has an exporter for Blender that not only exports the ShapeKeys but also the animation of the shapekeys, and more importantly it has a system that allows you to drive the face shapekeys from bone or object positions, rotations etc.

 

Thanks a lot MikeUpChat! I will look it up soon, and hope to finally find a solution!