Facial Setup
Asset Creation: Bone Driven Facial Rig Setup
You can setup your character with multiple bones for different parts of the face (eyebrows, lips, eyelids, etc). The Facial Rig has no specific criteria and can be setup by tech artists in the DCC using constraints, expressions or combinations of both.
Make sure the distinction is made to which facial bones have to be exported and which facial helpers are only used in DCC.
Facial bones that are exported with the game skeleton are the ones setup in Facial Editor.
If you have a Facial Rig, you can also export facial animations as .caf if you don't want to use the Facial Editor.
Phoneme Extraction
You can use whichever phoneme extraction process you like. They are fairly easy to plug into the system. Crytek uses the Annosoft phoneme extractor, which requires 49 separate phonemes. These must be named as follows to be picked up in the Facial Editor:
Symbol | Example | ID |
|---|---|---|
- | syllable boundary | 1 |
! | Sentence terminator | 2 |
& | word boundary | 3 |
, | Sentence terminator | 4 |
. | Sentence terminator | 5 |
_ | Sentence terminator | 6 |
? | Silence | 7 |
1 | Primary stress | 8 |
2 | Secondary stress | 9 |
AA | father | 10 |
AE | cat | 11 |
AE | cat | 11 |
AH | cut | 12 |
AO | dog | 13 |
AW | foul | 14 |
AX | ago | 15 |
AY | bite | 16 |
B | big | 17 |
CH | chin | 18 |
D | dig | 19 |
DH | then | 20 |
EH | pet | 21 |
ER | fur | 22 |
EY | ate | 23 |
F | fork | 24 |
G | gut | 25 |
H | help | 26 |
IH | fill | 27 |
IY | feel | 28 |
JH | joy | 29 |
K | cut | 30 |
L | lid | 31 |
M | mat | 26 |
N | no | 33 |
NG | sing | 34 |
OW | go | 35 |
OY | toy | 36 |
P | put | 37 |
R | red | 38 |
S | sit | 39 |
SH | she | 40 |
T | talk | 41 |
TH | thin | 42 |
UH | book | 43 |
UW | too | 44 |
V | vat | 45 |
W | with | 46 |
Y | yard | 47 |
Z | zap | 48 |
ZH | pleasure | 49 |
This is how it is setup in the Facial Editor:
Because for Annosoft, you need at least 41 phonemes, instead of re-creating each phoneme, visemes are used to create the phonemes. 11 visemes are enough for achieving good facial animation.
Each viseme is composed of multiple Bone Controls. For each facial bone, three position and three rotation controls are created.