How to export Blender shapekeys to Panda?
I’m using Chicken R91. Can you even get shapekey animations? The chicken manual description seems a bit confusing for me.
ASFAIK you can get shapekeys, but no animation, altough it shouldnt be hard to make a function to animate it. I thinks its just matter of changing shapekey value over time.
Go look at the examples linked from the manual - there is code demonstrating how to use them.
Yup, or, as it says, you can get it from the test directory.
Are shape key animations possible in Panda and is it a chicken thing or not?
EDIT: I mean currently, I want to use it for facial animation. Thats not something I would want to do in code. Like the same way I wouldn’t want to animate a walkcycle in Panda. I rather stick to face rigs, but I would like to know if one day it would be possible.
My understanding is you can’t key shapekeys - you have to set them in code, as demonstrated by that code. That is a current limitation of the Blender/Chicken/Panda setup, but I have no idea if the limitation exists in Panda or not - the shapekey code was provided to me, all I have ever done is clean it up and provide a few bug fixes. There is nothing to stop you using armatures at the same time as shapekeys however, and its quite possible to have some bones that don’t influence the model geometry combined with some code to drive the shapekeys from them, which you can also rig in Blender, so you can achieve that effect with some effort.
There are several demos in demomaster with shapekeys.
The “Morphing - Ripple” has shapekey animations but I believe it was not created by chicken.
The “Morphing - Captain Blender” has no animation neither.
The “Human - 1” demo, if you click on some facial animation functions, like “Happy”, it will play back an animation but that is driven by an animation module.
You can do something like in demomaster, or you can add some more code to chicken to support shapekey animations.
Thanks.
For some reason they don’t work for me. Maybe there is something wrong with my wxPython, I don’t see any gui in those demos.
I really don’t like the idea of animating by code.
Not enough knowledge for that.
So this basically means that shapekey animations are supported by the egg format and the Panda engine.
Can I post a feature request?
if no wxPython, you can start demomaster by:
demomaster.py f f f
Animation in demomaster is actually parameter file driven, not in code.
You can post a feature request, of course. But who will take care of it ?
Oh, will have a look.
Good question