Hi, I would like to invest in a combination of motion capture. And while searching I came across this “facerig” system apparently you can export a file with face animation, I was wondering how you can import it back into houdini?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W0RAyvFkC3Y [www.youtube.com]


there is the fbx file https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B9A2HzJCWwFWbm1hLVRjaTdfNlE/view [drive.google.com]

Someone please ?

Moin,

I am not clear about your question - you can “somehow import” almost everything into Houdini, so what is the answer you are looking for?

Creating a facial rig like the one in the Youtube video is quite simple - just use a reference rig with known facial landmark knots and drive that by an openCV facial landmark detection setup, so creating the “driver data” is pretty straight forward. An FBX with animation baked in should be fine, as long as topology and point order remain the same - if all fails, you just grab the point positions from a null-pose, reference those to your own driver rig and Bob's your uncle.

Whether the results you get are “usable” or not depends on the quality of YOUR rig: Do you have adequate automatic corrective morphs and a driver system for those? What about driving a hires mesh from a lowres mesh? That's all pretty standard when you are doing rigging/animation, but if you don't have any experience in that area, you might want to start by setting up your own pipeline and refining that to a point where you are comfortable with using external “low end” solutions (that you have to improve on anyway).

Not a REAL answer, but, again, your question isn't very specific either.

Marc

Thank you Marc, that helps me a lot.


What I wanted to know was if someone could show me how to do it with a little video like the one I posted. I understand about the workflow but I would like to know how to connect each point of the fbx to a 3d low poly mesh.

My workflow will be as follows, Zbrush sculpt high mesh convert lowpoly > Mixamo for some basic animations > Houdini to import the face mocap made under facerig .

It's just showing me concretely how to connect a point on the mocap to a point on the rig

But thank you again for your answer.

If my questions are not clear it's because I'm French and I have a basic English translator online ;-)

Translated with www.DeepL.com/Translator

Hi,

I am German (only using my bio-bubble-brain-brainslator), so I apologize for what seems like rudeness

Depending on your concrete setup what I would do (and have done it in the past) is using a VEX wrangle that looks for “nearpoints”. So your lower resolution mesh “attaches” itself to “suitable” points on the higher resolution mesh. Again, depending on the setup, you may have to create a “driving weight map” on the higher resolution mesh.

You might be able to use a raycast node, which allows you to wrap the above into a single node - it does not always work perfectly (obviously for topology reasons), but it could be a good start.

In quintessence: It depends. The problem with those “hobbyists face rigs” is that it looks good enough “in the lab” or for quick show-off-videos, but if you want to use it outside a comic environment, you have to put in a LOT OF WORK to make it look acceptable.

Marc

Thank you Marc ! you helped me ;-)