I’m trying to understand the best way to bring in vertex animation to Touchdesigner. I’ve tried bringing in both baked and un-baked animations via *.FBX, but no luck so far. Would greatly appreciate any tips!
If more details are helpful:
My test is just a pair of quads sharing a pair of vertices, I’m putting them on the same plane. I’m animating four of the vertices (two shared, two non-shared) over a timeline of a hundred frames, using keyframes (not even applying curves to the animation). This should be a pretty simple case (no bones, etc) but it is just importing as geometry.
Thanks Malcolm,
I actually figured out that this is happening on the modeler side of things (Maya). I got non-vertex animation to import perfectly fine, it seems that the issue is with getting vertex animation to properly export out of Maya via fbx. Looking at the fbx files themselves there is no vertex animation there.
I’ve attached an FBX with the vertex animation contained as a geometry cache. Still no luck on getting this animation into TouchDesigner (although TD seems aware that there is animation).
Hey,
We don’t currently support importing vertex caches in FBX files. The animations need be done using blend shapes, transforms, or skeletal deforms. I think if you could get Maya to export this as a blend shape animations that would do the trick.
Sorry
Thanks Malcolm!
Is there a detailed description somewhere or example of how the blend shape import should work? The SOP blend works with geometry imported via .obj (I know somewhere you recommend using a CHOP blend instead), but when I import an fbx with blend shapes things don’t seem to be working. I’ve attached an example.
Is there any plan to support vertex animations? I’m trying to figure out the best way to get Cinema 4D moving meshes into touch but so far its been fruitless.
I have begun experimenting with cinema4d/Touch .fbx animation importing. So far no .FBX(v6.x) animation data coming in. C4d is new to me, so it could be a flag on that end. Would love to hear success stories with c4d animation into TD. I’m confused about what the current state of .FBX importing is - would be nice if this were clearer (i.e: what the current supported version does and doesn’t support of said FBX version)
I’ve looked at (finally) the sample file that FDP posted and the blend shapes are coming in fine. They are disabled by default but you can enable them by changing the ‘disable_blendshapes’ Switch SOP that is in the pPlane2 network.
Perhaps it is just me, but I have the impression one needs to have mastered a phd thesis in 3D to import a 3D animation into touch designer. I don’t see any animation nor blendshapes into the example, just a flat plane.
The alembic format looks very similar to the .fbx format( which also has the ability to ‘bake’ animations per vertex,if I’m not mistaken). I would vote for more support for .fbx before adding yet another I/O file format. As I understand it .fbx supports vertex animations(baked deformations) but currently Touch does not.
I am trying to rig/import a face deformation into Touch. it’s quite involved on so many levels.
I’m thinking that asking TD to become a full-fledged character animating platform is a bit much at this juncture. Maybe fully-baked face anims are the way to go,rather than trying to rig up a bunch of stuff outside of your chosen 3d package. Blend SOP and Sequence Blend SOP’s seem to be pretty snappy- that was my main concern with blend shapes in realtime in TD.
I havent even remotely mastered C4d’s blend shapes paradigm. Honestly I’m thinking it would be easier to forgo any rig importation complexity and just import 5-10 ‘poses’ into TD as .dxf or .obj- as it is now though if I’m able to effectively bring in face poses in a .fbx file I usually find myself digging deep into a bunch of comps to find the essential 5-10 meshes, then arrange them all on one layer to input to a Blend SOP- but maybe I just need to learn better methods(scrpting?). So much to learn…
Personally, I have used the MDD format for vertex animation between different softwares and it is quite efficient. I thought it would be rather cool to have something like that in Touch Designer.
