W7&8 – Live Face/FaceIt/LiveLink
Week 7: I created my character, Avaten in MakeHuman. I spent way to much time trying to figure out how to export the rigged version of my avatar with facial morphs for Mixamo. Mixamo will not take the default rig from MakeHuman. It accepts the other rigs, but the face morphs do not transfer over. I should have just waited for Todd’s Week 7 lecture that explained the process for exporting MH character w/o bones into Blender (export scale is meter). Blender 3.01 or above with these “AddOns”: FaceIt and MHX Plugin. The one step I had to take with FaceIt was to separate the character head from the body because my character did not have any clothes.
It took some time to make sure that I had selected all the faces and points to separate the head and the body. The first time I did it, I realised that I had not selected the meshes inside the head. When I created my character in MH, I made the decision to not have symmetry for the facial features, which in FaceIt created some problems during the projection process. I went in and adjust the animations after the binding.
The MoCap takes recorded (Thank you Athena for being my Mocap Actor ☺), were then divided up into smaller takes during the retageting process in Motion Builder. From the last project, I realised that I needed in each take to record only the frames I wanted in Unreal… If I left the T-Pose in the take, for some unknown reason, the last frame of the animation in UE5 was the T-Pose and it made it really difficult to blend one animation to the next. Also the pivot point of the animations really interfered with the blending.
Below are some screen shots while creating the landscape, water bodies, and lighting. I started using Landscape Layers to create and Blend materials to edit my terrain. I’d like to understand better the Water River Body and it’s underwater post processing volume paramters to create a more surreal look. ‘Water and Sand’ is the title of my project. My theme starts to not only deal with isolation, internalized feelings and self-awareness, but also the importance of the environment. Take away the water from Earth and Sand is revealed. Ocean dwindle to lakes and rivers dwindle to streams. Mycelium and succulants emerge from the sand.
