FaceFX Support

FaceFX Documentation and support

What’s New in 2012

Release Date: August 24, 2011

New Features

• Added Mandarin, Czech, and a framework for supporting new languages.
• Support for wxPython for creating GUIs from python.
• Emoticons
• Full Body Animations
• Animation Compression to reduce memory and disk usage by up to 90%
• Added centralized mounting/unmounting of animation sets to save in-game memory
• Added ability to change the camera near / far clip distance on a per-camera basis from the camera creation / edit dialog.
• Improved coarticulation using componentized mapping with tongue-only targets.
• Added duration and magnitude scale spawn conditions to events.
• added -overwite flag to key command

• Added -noautoexec command line option that disables autoexec.fxl execution

• added -starttime and -fullskeleton flags to fbx command.

• Added support for site-packages directory for installing 3rd party modules in Studio’s Python implementation (Studio\Python26\site-packages).

• Added support for .ogg files (previously the .oga extension was recognized only)

• FaceFX Studio now checks for updates

• Cut, Copy & Pasting keys and events now uses the windows clipboard and works in between different instances of studio

• After crashing, switch default render system to direct3D as the most common crashes are due to display drivers.

• Added better error messages to the log for text tag processing

Bugfixes

• MEL script’s “batch export morph targets” function only worked if the target geometry wasn’t deleted. (hotfix)

• Prevent crash on content with more than OGRE_MAX_NUM_BONES (256) bones. (hotfix)

• Face graph setups with a lot of nodes no longer create abnormally large file sizes (hotfix).

• Auto-compute slope no longer produces bogus slopes when inserting first or final keys.
• Fixed a wxwarning and potential crash when analyzing from the root directory “C:" or a relative directory with improper path separators “samples/audio” for the given platform.
• hyphens are no longer used in the the text-stream, preventing them from being interpreted as “minus” or from double-hyphens confusing the parser.
• Fixed off-by-1 error in recent files
• Fixed issues with morph targets not being rendered correctly when non-shared geometry is used
• The XSI plugin warns when a neutral pose is detected that will prevent setting keys correctly, and gives them the option to fix it.
• Fixed potential out-of-memory crash with recursive events by setting a hard limit of 50,000 events in a take.

Structural Changes

• removed newly added getDirectory() functions – now always use getDirectory().
• Curves with the same name as a bone (bone curves) have been deprecated.  FxBoneWeightNodes are used for skeleton animation integration.
• Changed key paste behavior
• Added support for Autodesk 2012 product line.
• Updated to wxWidgets-2.8.11
• Upgraded to Python 2.6.5.
• Python works with signals, not callbacks.  Multiple functions can be connected to a singnal.
• Removed the python shell from the command tab, and created a separate Python tab.
• executable was renamed facefx-studio.exe
• Copy & paste keys & events now uses windows clipboard.  Does not work in no-save version, but works in between different instances of FaceFX Studio.
• Events for animations with no curves or zero-duration curves are drawn with a default length of 1.
• Added dependency on ICU for analysis
• Normalized Power curve is created with default analysis actors, and used to amplify speech curves in sample content.

Supported Animation Packages

• 3ds Max - 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012
• Maya - 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012
• XSI - 7, 2010, 2011, 2012
• MotionBuilder - 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012

New Scripting Capabilities

• Added the following python functions:

  • displayAnimationSelectionDialog

  • displayNodeSelectionDialog

  • dockInMainWindowNotebook

  • getAppIconPath

  • getActorPythonDictionary

  • getAnimPythonDictionary

  • getColorPalette

  • getConsoleCommandHelp

  • getConsoleCommandList

  • getConsoleVariableAsSwitch

  • getConsoleVariableList

  • getFaceGraphNodeSliderValue

  • getMainWindowNotebook

  • getPreviewAnimationSettings

  • getRenderAssetAnimationInfo

  • getSelectedTabInMainWindowNotebook

  • getSkeletalAnimationTreeAnims

  • getTabsInMainWindowNotebook

  • getTabWindowInMainWindowNotebook

  • getUnicodeFontName

  • setActorPythonDictionary

  • setAnimPythonDictionary

  • styledButtonGetToggleValue

  • styledButtonMakeToggle

  • styledButtonSetIconByPath

  • styledButtonSetToggleValue

  • renderAssetHasSkeletalAnimationTree

  • selectTabInMainWindowNotebook

  • undockFromMainWindowNotebook

• Added the following console variables:

  • g_analysisactorsdirectory

  • g_analysislanguagesdirectory

  • g_appanalysisactorsdirectory

  • g_appanalysislanguagesdirectory

  • g_usenewcoarticulation

  • g_applaunchtime

  • g_appscriptsdirectory

  • g_appthemesdirectory

  • g_appversion

  • g_checkforupdatesonstartup

  • g_logdirectory

  • g_productname

  • g_productversion

  • g_scriptsdirectory

  • g_sdkversion

  • g_settingsdirectory

  • g_skipupdateversion

  • g_skipupgradeversion

  • g_templatedirectory

  • g_themesdirectory

  • g_usenewcoarticulation

  • ogre_default_far_distance

  • ogre_default_near_distance

  • po_compression_framerate

  • po_compression_aggressiveness

• Added the following python signals (formerly referred to as callbacks):

  • appstartup

  • appshutdown

  • newanimationdataavailable

  • phonemewordlistchanged

  • previewanimationsettingschanged

  • refresh

  • renderassetloaded

  • renderassetloadfailed

  • renderassetnamechanged

  • skeletalanimationtreechanged

See Also

What’s new in 2010 What’s new in 2009