Hey guys 👋
First of all I want to say thanks for the newer version of the audio2face which is absolutely breathtaking with the new female trained character🫣
I want to pay your attention more on game creation softwares such as Unity working along with Audio2Face, which workflow for now is very complicated unlike the Unreal Engine cooperation with A2F. After 8 months of working with A2F, Blender and Unity I’ve made a workflow for myself of bringing the A2F face animation on my character in Unity using Blender and for 1 face animation of a speech I need to follow the instruction I’ve done for 8 PAGES!!! Yes it is huge, and very time taking, need about 2 hours of time on each anim, but for now there is no other way. People here told me to use the Unity connector, but that connector has nothing to do with bringing the animation from A2F to Unity. So I have a question. Do your team plan to publish some Unity plugin for bringing in the A2F animation on the character in Unity? This proccess is very easy for Unreal Engine, but there is no easy way to do it Unity. Thanks!
Hi @zanarevshatyan
We released the UE livelink plugin in hopes of giving users enough sample codes so they can start creating these kinds of plugins themselves. That said, we might do this for Unity at some point in the future. But no plans for now.
- You could use Audio2Face’s livelink extension as a starting point and reference for creating the custom streaming extension. It can be found in a folder similar to this:
C:\Users\<UserName>\AppData\Local\ov\pkg\prod-audio2face-2023.1.1\exts\omni.avatar.livelink
- You could also use A2F->UE livelink plugin as a reference for receiving blendShape weights. It can be found in a folder simliar to this:
C:\Users\<UserName>\AppData\Local\ov\pkg\prod-audio2face-2023.1.1\ue-plugins\audio2face-ue-plugins
I’m zero at coding, in this case it won’t help me at all.
as a fellow OV user, i don’t want to underestimate what you’ve gone through to have a solid pipeline down. in fact, i commend you on laying down all the ground work to make it work the way you want and however you prefer. on the flip side of the coin, though, i would argue if it’s an urgent need, you could look into hiring a programmer to help out. would it be awesome if everything is developed for all major packages? of course! but the truth of the matter is, they have a roadmap to stick to and have to prioritize accordingly for internal development. so, some patience is needed for us users until the dev team can accommodate additional connectors/support. in the meantime, they may have limited capacity just to iterate and bug-fix what’s already out there. personally, i wouldn’t want them to stop the development of A2F (or any of the OV products, for that matter) just so they can make a bug-ridden program available to all DCCs.
that said, there have been successes from users/devs based on what i’ve read here on the forum after being pointed to the UE plugin as a template, so i have no doubt it’s doable. and who knows? maybe some of them have put it out there already. i haven’t done an extensive search online myself, so i cannot point you in the right direction on that, unfortunately.
my sentiment is this - given it’s already one of many easily accessible software for public consumption that is still being developed on a daily basis, i am sure the team needs to make sure all emphasis is on ensuring existing functionalities and new features get addressed first. we can take a look at Blender, another open sourced program, it probably wouldn’t be able to get as robust as it is today without all the custom plugins/addons that were contributed by individual devs/programmers.
as the user numbers and knowledge base grow, there will be more resources made available. but whether users are willing to share their experiences and tools come down to themselves. for example, you may not want people to get access to your 8 pages worth of instructions; but it may help a heaps of new users. but would you be willing to contribute to the community? it’s totally up to you.
but that’s just my 2c
there are a few users on Discord that have shared some of the effort for this, feel free to check in periodically and see their progress.