Blendshape Animation in VRED

[Anonymous]

Hello,

I want to import a maya blendshape animation to vred but can't seem to find any solution online. If somebody has a hint on how to approach this I would be very happy, since I already tried to bake every single object and go thorugh every fbx export setting but without any success.

Cheers

[seiferp]

Hi, Maya Blendshapes are not supported in VRED! But if you are able to bake the animation it might work using the Vertex Cache in the FBX format. Autodesk Knowledge Forum

[Anonymous]

What do you mean with "if I am able to bake the animation"? It's my first time using maya and vred in that regards so it's still quiet abstract for me to understand the steps i need to do.

[Anonymous]

So I managed to get a vertex animation into VRED. Here is what I did: I cached the deforming geometry and exported it to a new .mb file. In there I imported the cache, animation plays just fine, created a set and then exported it to an fbx.

Now the Vertex Animation shows up in VRED but it's not playing. Any tips on what i might missed out here?

Regards

//Edit: Shared the Scene. Take note of the node editor bookmark in test.mb to control the blendshape.

[seiferp]

Try FBX like showing in the video... Can you share the file unbaked blend shape animation file?

[Anonymous]

Attached you find the file in the state from where I would like to export. In the node editor under the bookmark "Weight Control" you see, how the distance of the two locators to each other drive the weight of the blend node.

All I want to export to VRED is the animated geometry of the cube that changes it's appearance.

[seiferp]

I´m not able to open the attached file. Made another video with maya blendshapes.

Hope this helps.

[Anonymous]

I figured out why it is not working. Since a connection is driving my weight in the node editor, I can't key the value and therefore am not able to cache it. No I need to figure out a workaround.

[Anonymous]

I tried using your method but had to improvise keying the blendshape as you see in the screencast. Now I#m not even getting a vertex animation into VRED anymore.

//Edit: Ok I do in fact have a vertex animation in there, i just had to select the object. But it still doesnt play the animation...

[Anonymous · Accepted solution]

With the help of Seiferp i could find a workaround and I would like to post it to close the topic!

So in theory, my approach of caching the geometry that is driven by a blendshape, and then exporting it to VRED should work, also when the weight is driven by another node but for some weird reason it just wouldnt work in my scene.

So what I did is not that elegent but gave me a quickfix to move on with my work. I chose the animated geometry that I wanted to export and wrote a tiny MEL script to export the selected objects into an obj every frame for a specified amount of frames. Obviously I had to handle more Data now but the result was basically the same and VRED didn't had any problems in handling the files in a switch node to animate them.

Here's the script for the lazy guys:

$x=0;

//Adjust the loop for the length of your animation
for( $i=0; $i<50; ++$i )
		{    
		    string $filename = ("C:/Users/USER/Desktop/Frame" +$x+".obj");
			currentTime (`currentTime -q`+1);
			file -op "" -typ "OBJexport" -pr -es $filename;
			$x++;
};

Kudos to seiferp who helped me to get done in time!

Cheers

[seiferp]

Happy to hear that we saved your presentation  Yah, really wired that the same workflow worked for simple geometry but maya failed to save the set in your file. I have used the workaround you described for importing fluid animation from Realflow and Moldflow years ago. Hope you now have time to pimp your scene and thanks for sharing your Mel script.

[Anonymous]

Hi, 

I'm doing the same things in a vred file. When my animation is imported, i can "play" it with the timeline, but not with an animation variantset, just like my others animations created in VRED.

Any idea to solve that ? (if i do a right click on the animation in the curves editor, and then "play", nothing happens...)

[seiferp]

Create a Clip in the ClipEditor first and drag your Cache Animation from the CurveEditor in there. Than use the Clip in the Animation Tab of the Vsets and you are ready to go.