Metahuman Head Motion From Face Performance Capture (with working Control Rig!)
Metahumans are designed to have their neck and head animation driven from the body, but face performance capture solutions including Metahuman Animator, LiveLink Face, Faceware Studio and others capture head motion to the Head/Face portion of metahuman characters.
This video shows how you can setup metahumans to use this face-captured head motion on the metahuman body within sequencer, preserving all the functionality of both body and face control rigs, without breaking the head's ability to follow the body properly.
Many other solutions make potentially damaging alterations to animation or post-process blueprints connected to the head, which can result in problems later in the production pipeline such as disconnected head from body, and/or inability to use the body control rig with the head animation.
This video's approach makes minor, safe and reversable adjustments to at the Metahuman actor's body definition resulting in easy, repeatable and predictable head performance, driving by face performance capture, without damaging any of the metahuman's regular functionality.
Topics covered in this video ....
00:00 Introduction
00:29 Record Face Animation
01:05 Overview and Restuls
03:45 Skelton Compatibility Explained
05:16 Set Skeleton Compatibility
06:27 Create Blending Animation Blueprint
07:13 Animation Slots Explained
07:47 Adding Animation Slot Nodes
08:33 Setting up Layered Blend per Bone
09:51 Defining Default Blend Value of Zero
10:32 Defining Blending Variable
11:15 Activating Expose to Cinematics
11:52 Setup a new Level Sequence
12:10 Apply Body Animation Blueprint
13:08 Add Body Animation
14:56 Add Head Animation
15:29 Assign Head Animation to FaceSlot
16:02 Activate FaceValue for Face Head Motion
16:38 Add Facial Performance Animation
17:38 Have fun!