Carrara ERC and Genesis 2
zimzooma
Posts: 14
I've been using ERC to drive facial animation exported from Faceshift with great success. Up to this point I've been using Genesis characters but today I tried it with a Genesis 2 character. It seems that I'm not able to access the same parameters on the Genesis 2 characters. Has anyone else experienced this? Big thanks to Conrad3d for posting an ERC tutorial at Carrara Cafe, It really helped me get started.
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Soooooooo, I feel slightly less intelligent. If I check "Use Group" on "Property to be Controlled" then all the parameters are accessible. They are just not listed in the same hierarchy. Now I'm going to go test my Faceshift data on Genesis 2.
Awesome!
I started typing a reply to your first, that Genesis 2 is an entirely new figure, with a slightly different setup for all of that, but I figured that you've already seen that - and you did. Glad to see that you're back in business!
Hi zimzooma, Conrad3DC here (can't change my username on here).
I have an entire set of ERC config files but I abandoned the ERC route as it was really bogging down Carrara (having 48 ERC modifiers on the head alone). Going that route also had issues with network rendering so I found a much better way of implementing Faceshift on V4 and M4 by modifying the bone structure of the V/M 4 CR2 files. It adds all of the faceshit blendshapes to the existing skelaton and then uses the native internal ERC to control the face morphs through the movements of the new (invisible) bones which have the imported BVH data in their keyframe channels. It works really well and I actually wanted to give the modified CR2 files out to the Carrara community but I was told that it would violate the Daz content licence. Pity because with the morphs being driven from seperate channels you could change the standard morph sliders and freely modify your characters facial expressions in conjunction with (on top of) the faceshift animation.
Not to be defeated I wrote a conversion tool to convert the text export from the Faceshift software into a PZ2 file. It basicly retargets the faceshift blenshapes to the Daz character face morphs and as such is a very decent solution. However Carrara does not let you import a PZ2 files onto a Genesis/2 character but I figured out that you can drag and drop it onto Genesis/2 in Daz3D studio and then export the animation to Carara... so that will be my pipeline for G/2.
I haven't worked out all of the ratio conversion for G2 (some are the same as G and V4) as I am working mosty with V4 but that would be the way to do it.
I have a little work left to do on conversion ratios and program coding but I've been taking a break from that project because I got burned out from almost the last 5 months of relentlessly hunting for a distributable solution.
If you like I'll finish up my code and let you have at it to come up with the G2 convertion ratios.
I wrote the tool in JavaScript (so anyone could run it on anything). Its simple to use, you load the HTML file in a browser and then open your Faceshift export file and it pops out the PZ2 file.
I was kind of wondering where you were at with Carrara and Faceshift after reading your tutorial. Just last night I was testing a .bvh file hooked up via ERC. After I saved the file, Carrara could't open it again, kept crashing. I was going to try to let ERC write keyframes and then delete the Faceshift .bvh from the scene.
I would be extremely grateful if you shared your work. It seems the route I am trying is simply too much for Carrara to handle. After seeing that Brekel has PZ2 export I figured that someone would eventually create something for Faceshift data.
This community is great.
Thank you for the reply.
I was running into the same thing although I can't fault ERC or Carrara as both are excellent. I just don't think anyone ever imagined there would be a need to have more than a few modifiers on any given node. I'll work on the conversion tool over the weekend and hopefully by next week I'l have all the kinks out of it. It's still a little crude at this stage but it's built in a way that the remapping data for each figure can be popped into a box on the page. That way you'll be able to experiment with Gen4, Genesis and Genesis 2.
Thank you again. I'll try and work out those G2 ratios to further the cause.
zimzooma,
Apologies for the delay in getting back to you. I'm trying to juggle way too many things at the same time right now (as usual).
I have completed a rough working version but am running into some issues with eye and head rotations/translation not being what they should be after import. The blendshapes/morphs are solid so I can get you the file so that you can start experimenting with it.
Are you using Faceshift 2014? The blendshape list changed quite a bit since the previous version so I would need to configure the code one way or the other before sending you the file.
No worries, its such a busy time of year. I've been stretched a bit myself and as such haven't had much time outside of work the past couple weeks.
I'm using Faceshift 2014.
Thanks again.
Hi zimzooma,
I just wanted to check that you got the file I sent a few days ago. I PM'd it to you as a zip. I didn't get any confirmation after I hit submit so I'm not sure if it actually was sent.
I did get it. My apologize for not replying. I haven't had a chance to touch it yet.