FaceFX Support
FaceFX Documentation and support
.FaceFX Exporters
Table of Contents
- Importing Animations
- Batch Import and Export Bone Pose Functionality
- Baked Curves vs. Raw Curves
- See also
The FaceFX plug-ins are 3ds Max, Maya, or XSI utilities that can create, modify, and get data out of FaceFX Actor Files (*.facefx), which contain everything needed by a game or 3D application to play bones or morph-based animations.
Typical uses include:
- Defining the Rest Pose and Bone poses for bones-based characters.
- Getting FaceFX animation data into the animation package via Script Functions or importing the animation from the plugin GUI.
- Generating new animations (especially important for users who only have a license for the plugin, and not FaceFX Studio)F
- When importing animations, make sure the FaceFx plugin is capable of setting bone transforms for the bones in the rest pose. Attributes that are locked, bones being driven by IK, or bones with controllers like Character Studio that do not allow an external plugin to set keys are common problems when importing animations (or importing bone poses for that matter).
- Animation data at FaceFX time = 0 will correspond to the current time cursor in the animation package. Bones animation data is baked and a key is inserted for every bone in the rest pose at every frame. Morph target nodes look for an equivalent morph target to drive and insert keys corresponding to the keys in FaceFX.
FaceFX plug-ins support “Batch Import” and “Batch Export” functionality for exporting and importing bone poses. See Batch Export Text File.
The plug-ins can return key information for curves via script functions. Curves can be raw or baked. Raw curves return the exact key values, times, and slopes. Raw curves may not accurately reflect the node’s value over time because they do not take into account the node’s minimum or maximum values or any input values from other nodes. Baked curves are a (fairly accurate) approximation of the node’s value over time. In most cases, baked curves are more useful.