Maya - Unity -> lip sync and facial animation

Hello all,

I'm working on a game Unity project but I'm in trouble with the character lip sync animations because time of production is very strict and we don't have time to make it "manually" in Maya.

For this reason I'm looking for the best low budget workflow that allows me to realize the lip sync and facial expression animations with motion capture (I've been looking for similar discussions in the forum without finding them) and integrate it with my characters modeled with Maya and rigged with Mixamo.

I've seen that there is a Unity plugin called Cinema Face Cap but the problem is that it works only in Unity and it doesn't allow to export .fbx for Maya.
I've also found LipSync Pro but I don't understand if I can use it with Maya Character and if it allow me to export fbx file.

Have you any suggestion?
Thanks all for the help!

 

Can anybody give me some suggestions?

 

Maya has a few plugins, one by digomatic to handle lip syncing. It will generate the animation for you which you can then Polish. Setup requires you to create viseme shapes (mouth positions) for phonemes (sounds - a, e, O, check, etc.. Think of the Disney 7). Once you have the visemes the plugin animates between them using your setup which you can then Polish & export.

LipSync Pro work in similar way I think. In that it will generate viseme animation for you to use at runtime, but it will need you to supply those viseme assets. You could probably set them up in Unity if your using bones.. But blend shapes would need to come from Maya. It would be simpler to setup these assets in Maya and then export them to Unity for use with LipSync or other Unity plugins.

If you're looking for speed setup the assets in maya and use LipSync. Polishing animations might be a bit tricky in Unity. If you are willing to lengthen turnaround time on facial, use digomatic and stay within Maya. It'll say you time but you then have Maya's tool to polish up the animation for exactly what you need. Full automation leads to "My face is tired."...

Hope this helps!