As mentioned in a previous post, DAZ Studio 4.15 supports FACS. The latest commits of the DAZ Importer also does so, even if not everything works perfectly yet. R. Keoni Garcia pointed out that you can make facial mocap animations with FaceCap (iOS facial capture app for devices with Face ID) and export them as a text file. Get more information about FaceCap at http://www.bannaflak.com/.
So I made a tool which imports FaceCap files and applies them to a DAZ character. Here is the result using the example recording from Bannaflak. Unfortunately, the only recording that I found has a male voice, and DAZ Studio only supports FACS for female characters so far, so that is a bit disturbing. But if you can disregard that, I think the result is pretty cool, at least as a first try.
- New Action: Create a new action for this animation.
- Action Name: The name of the new action.
- Frame Rate: The frame rate in the imported file. FaceCap seems to export animations in 24 fps.
- Head Location: Include the head location in the animation. The head location actually affects the hip bone. In reality, the location of the head depends both on the hip location and the rotation of the spine and neck bones, but the FaceCap file does not provide enough data to disentangle the dependence. Changing the head's local location only is not an option, because it would compress and stretch the neck in a most unnatural way (I tried that).
- Head Rotation: Include the head rotation in the animation. The tool assigns the entire rotation to the head bone's local rotation, although in reality the head rotation also depends on the rotation of the spine and hip bones.
- Eyes Rotation: Include the rotation of the eye bones in the animation.
