solved Blend shapes

[HoratioHuffnagel]

Hi,

I am a Maya user, and I am looking for a 3D engine that will support morph targets / blend shapes. From what I can see the Maya exporter for Babylon does support this - however, the code suggests it only supports one blend shape deformer per mesh.

Now - I need to be able to create a character editor that supports modifying multiple attributes (i.e. mouth width, eye spacing, facial structure etc). I also need to be able to use skeletal animation exported from Maya (as a separate file).

Any thoughts on how I could achieve this?

Thanks!

HF

[Guest]

Hello!

So no problem to export your mesh with skeleton as a separated file. For blend shapes I'm not an expert of Maya but you should be able to have multiple targets per mesh. Not sure about how to export it though (pinging @noalak for more info)

[noalak]

Hi HoratioHuffnagel,

Indeed currently the exporter only supports one blend shape deformer per mesh.

A Maya blend shape deforrmer is actually an exact copy of a Babylon morph target manager. And a mesh in Babylon can't have multiple morph target managers.

We didn't focus on the multiple blend shape deformers case because we weren't sure of the usecases of such feature.

So here are some questions:

Are you using multiple blend shapes deformers only for clarity during creation/edition process ?

From the result POV, is it the same as having a single blend shape deformer listing all targets ?

If so, it is possible for you to do modify multiple attributes by listing all targets (example: mouth_1, mouth_2, mouth_3, eyes_1, eyes_2, eyes_3...) and adjusting weights accordingly.

[HoratioHuffnagel]

Hi,

Thanks for getting back to me - yes. That does seem to be feasible. We should be able to take the one mesh, and modify multiple attributes and adjusting the weights accordingly. I may have misunderstood the purpose of the multiple blend shape deformers. If that feature is not required to allow multiple, tunable attributes on the same mesh - then it's probably fine. If I can independently tune eyes, mouth, nose etc - with just the one deformer, it should be fine.

I was just a bit suspicious that when looking at the documentation for the Babylon fbx loader - there is no mention whatsoever regarding blend shapes or morph targets. I guess it's just out of date?

Regards,

HH

[Sebavan]

The support seems to be in both the 3dsMax documentation and gltf. Could you point to the page you are referring to so that I can update it ?

[HoratioHuffnagel]

In the supported features under Maya.

https://doc.babylonjs.com/resources/maya#exported-features

You'll note that in the 3DS version of the same doc - it says it supports Morph Targets.

https://doc.babylonjs.com/resources/3dsmax#exported-features

I checked in the maya docs for both morph and blend (given terminology is slightly different) and could find nothing.

Cheers,

HF

[noalak]

Hi,

Thanks for pointing that out! Updating Maya exporter docs.

 

Quote

I was just a bit suspicious that when looking at the documentation for the Babylon fbx loader - there is no mention whatsoever regarding blend shapes or morph targets

You were talking about a .babylon file being exported from Maya right ? Babylon FBX loader does not exist yet, but OBJ does!

 

Noalak

 

[HoratioHuffnagel]

Sorry yes, I am looking at Babylon FBX exporter features. I guess the json format would be fine - but I am investigating the gLTF loader. OBJ just doesn't support the features I need (animations for one).