FaceFX in UnReal: Part 1

FaceFX is a facial animation software and it is natively supported inside UnReal Editor. If you have a need to do Machinima and your characters need to talk or show some animated expressions, then you need FaceFX. In the absense of any documentation or decent tutorial on how to do this, it was a real nightmare for me to figure out how to pull it all together. I want to thank Dave Tyner (from http://www.treadster.com) for patiently helping me out on this one. A big shoutout to you!

OK. On with the tutorial. As usual, I will just keep it as brief and as simple as possible so readers are not bogged down by details. You can work on the details once you have figured out how to get this thing working.


You need the FaceFX plugin for 3DSMax in order to export FaceFX animations. If you have patched your Unreal, just do a .dlu search.


Choose the version that matches your 3DSMax (version 9 worked with Max2008) and put it into the plugins directory and run Max.


You can then access FaceFX plugin under Utilities.


Next you will need the Gear_Marcus.max character, downloadable from UDN. Observe how they rigged the face. You can apply the same rig to your custome character that you want talking.


First, the easy bit. Using ActorX, export Marcus's head.


Then, with FaceFX opened, Create Actor.


Select all the bones you want to export and Export them under Reference Bones.


It should look like this.


Scroll down to Bone Poses. The Marcus character comes with some nice animations so you can scrub through and find the facial poses that you like. Export a set of poses.


These are the Phonemes I need for my custom animation.


Save it to create a .fxa file.

That's it for Part 1. In Part 2, we will work with UnReal Editor to get things cooking!