Facial animation with data from mockup

[Macmik]

Hi, 

I am a student with really basic knowledge about Maya and animation. I want to ask for your tips/suggestions about facial animation with data from the mockup.

Short description of the problem: I have a 3D trajectory of mockup facial markers (3D position of each marker in time). Now I want to export this data (XYZ positions of markers in time) into a format that can be easily connected with the face rig in Maya. I know that the most popular format is .fbx, mostly used with rotation and translation of bones in the skeleton, in full-body animation. 

My question: How does face animation work? How these face markers are defined on the rig (face doesn't have any bones)? Does the .fbx format is the best for facial animation and how it should look like to apply it on face rig? Or maybe I should think differently if I have only the 3D position of individual face markers? 

[hamsterHamster]

The trackpoint positions should be in facial (local) space, not traveling through the scene. Otherwise you'd need to re-bake those to local. And, easiest to set up this would be with face rig setup that is based on joints.

FBX is fine, just ensure the imported nodes don't have crazy names, like FBX8975973293749287.

All you need is to figure out how to export that tracking data as anything you can get in Maya - groups/locators/joints.

Once you have imported the animated transforms, then parent everything under one locator, which, in turn, should be parented/parentConstrained to the head joint, scaled, rotated, so that it fits the overall face shape. The thing here is, you need skinned facial joints approximately where your trackpoints are - when the latter are imported, you can no-brainer-pointConstrain-with-offset the former to the according tracker.

Still, complex and mindnumbing to set up for one character, however, once you standardize the joints and use automation scripts, then can be recreated for similar shapes rapidly.

For more different head/face shapes, e.g. horse, dragon, crocodile etc., you can use those tracker data to driven-key either joints, or blendshapes.. yet, that's whole another story.