A checkbox at export for ARKit eye_Look blendshapes
Currently in CC4, a character's eyeball geometry is driven by its skeleton joint. In the Facial Profile, the eight 'Eye Look' expressions (look Up, Down, In, Out) are driven by a combination of bone transforms and mesh deformations for the entire eye area (eyeball, eyelid, eyelash, surrounding facial mesh).
However, ARKit face capture only looks at blendshape deformation; it doesn't know about skeleton rigs. While this works fine within CC4 and iClone, exporting the character for use in a third party program fails, because the eyeballs' rotational motion (joint driven) is not converted, while the surrounding mesh expression (eyelid, lash, etc) continues to work when the blendshape is activated.
What I'd love to see is a simple checkbox at export which would unify the Eye Look expressions and convert the eyeball's rotational data into morph data, combined within their respective blendshapes. This would work similar to your 'Mouth Open as Morph' export checkbox that already exists, which serves to unify the bone & mesh deformations of the jaw, tongue & teeth into a single blendshape.
This is crucial for ARKit retargeting, as eye tracking is the second most important aspect of face capture besides mouth/lip sync.
Alternately, you could include a character template which doesn't have eye joints at all, whose eyeballs are driven entirely by mesh deforms, in order to work directly with the ARKit model.
I 100% support this - a big reason why I chose to buy CC$ was the specific mention of ARKIT on some of the product pages, but I've not yet found a reliable way to export a character with deformation-only blendshapes.
There's a lot of scripts and facial profiles that nearly get there, but each one has had some small issues and has not been production-ready.
The pipeline I'm working in uses Cinema4D with Rokoko source motion and face capture - a pure ARKIT blendshape export would be perfect for this. I can use the CC4DTools, but the additional rigging that generates makes working with multiple characters impractical.
TLDR - please add a one-click option to export an FBX with the full set of ARKIT blendshapes, named to match the ARKIT standards, and baking any bone-based deformation into the posemorphs. Cheers!
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