Rigged Face

[khatarat]

hi
how can i import a rigged face into my irrlicht scene and apply some animation to this face?

[robmar]

If you look in the Wiki, you can find the supported animation types: http://irrlicht3d.org/wiki/index.php?n=Main.FAQ

Not all rigging methods are supported, but you may be able to convert formats to one of the supported, like b3d or md2 and 3.

[Mel]

Use bones, anything with bones can be used in Irrlicht

[khatarat]

is there any tutorial that show me how can i import and apply animation to a rigged mesh?

[robmar]

what´s the format of your rigged mesh?

[khatarat]

i did not create this mesh yet . i want to create a rigged mesh base on the best way it can imported to irrlicht. i want to create this mesh in 3ds max.

[robmar]

well you may have problems with 3ds max, as it has also sorts of rigging support that may not carry across to any format irrlicht supports.

I´m not an expert, so maybe someone who has done this with irrlicht could comment...

[christianclavet]

Hi,

Face rigging is a very complex topic. It will require a lot of work! I recommend that you have 2 models. One with the face rig and one without. Because all the bones in the model will take a lot of CPU/GPU time. You should use the face rigged model only when you are doing close up.

You can check this tutorial here on how to set up this in Blender.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f5XwaPq25fM

As Mel said, you can ONLY use bones based rig. There is another technique called "morph targets" that interpolate vertex positions. Irrlicht could perhaps support it. MD2 format support vertex based animation, but was never designed for this. I've not seen any specific exporter (except some made for games engines (ActorX for Unreal, the VTA format (Vertex Animation) for the source engine http://www.wunderboy.org/sourceapps.php ). Vertex type animation would be great for face expression but it's really hard to have support for it. Hence the need to do all the face animation with Bones.

This could work with MAX or blender using the FBX or Collada format, but the end of the chain (engine) need to support this. As far, as I know only the AAA engines support this and need their own exporter to work.

[Klunk]

IMHO morph targets is the way forward for realtime work, there is a definitive book (and I mean definitive) on the subject (creating realistic morphs) http://www.amazon.co.uk/Stop-Staring-Fa ... 0782141293. I've implement an morph export for my exporter a while back but not done the irrlicht support code as yet. But I think it should be pretty straight forward to create a custom scene node to handle it, even without a custom exporter. Just need to collect the morph target meshes, which should be vertex positions only and non renderable, then vertex position is the sum of the weighted positions from the morph targets . The change in the weighting is whats animated over time.

[robmar]

I saw a totally realistic real-time facial animation with lip syncing a few months ago, not sure whether it was from nVidia or DX10 samples, but it was just totally real.

If anyone knows the one I mean, pls let me have the link!!