I finally figured out how to do morphers to control facial animation in MAX (at least I think so but i'll have to try it with my characters to know if it works) my question: Does GameGuru support facial animation with 3ds max morph modifier? or will facial animation be strictly in the cutscenes

I think problem might be getting voice to sync.
perhaps a script from one of the great scriptwriters here could help.

https://youtu.be/vtJxgbY8vqg

nice video. I don't forsee this being a scripting problem, and PERFECT lipsync is not important. I just wanna know if .x files will retain the proper morph-target data for me to do facial animation without a bone-rigged face. I would be plugging this stuff in and trying myself but I'm home for the holidays with only a macbook to use, so I figured i'd just ask the community if they had experience with this to know if it's worth my time when i get back home.

Using morphs in GG is pretty unlikely as .x will only store the one level from a modifier stack and this is going to be the skinning of your character. Not to mention that GameGuru doesn't support any kind of morphing anyhow. You could get away with converting the morph animation data attached to dummies per vertex but seems like a bunch of work for a limited effect and probably best to use an additional face bone rig with a lesser number of dummies, GG will use these dummies as bones but without counting these in the bone limit which is a bonus.
I can see how you wouldn't want to be animating all those phonemes by hand so maybe attaching dummies to appropriate bones in the face rig to drive the animations and using these linked to animated vertices in the face before export, complex and a horrible workaround but no other easier way I can think of for .x and gameguru at this time.

If your body is static and you only need to animate the head then you might find a way to use vertex animation but still got the problem of converting morph data to vertex anim in your modeling package. I managed to do this by attaching a lot of dummies to each vertex and after recording the animations to these you can collapse and re-attach to the skinned model, it is complex but it does work and is at work in the ghostly wraith character. It takes a small leap of the imagination to see the cloth animation as morph data in a facial lip sync, same principle would apply.
Probably easier to simply use cutscenes all the same.

Ironically this is the kind of thing I would love to get my teeth into with GG (pardon the pun), and pretty much know for sure it could be done albeit with a fair bit of workaround,but as you probably know I am not spending so much time on it these days

Still if you do it once then the rig could be re-used for other things.

can you give some further explaination on this dummies method?

They have proven to be EXTREMELY helpful in skateboarding and gun animations, but I was under the impression that dummies couldnt be attached to specific verts on an already rigged model...

I've only used them to control IK on a skateboard/feet and fake IK on gameguru gun animations (dummy for the wobbles, dummy for moving arm and mag, dummy for moving arm and lever, etc)

but thats all dummies attached to meshes or bone rigs or biped bones, never tried dummies on vertexes.
if this outside of my skill level/wheelhouse I understand, but i bet if it works its a technique that could be applied to a lot of other gameguru animation situations.

It has been a while since I was doing this and a comprehensive tutorial is out side of my time available but put simply if your using Max (you will need to find the alternative methods for your own modeling app if not).

You can attach arrays of dummies to faces using several different scripts available (search for attach to vertex/face Max scripts) can't remember off hand right now how to do it in detail but you can also use transform parameters directly in Max to attach to faces.

You will also need a way to assign anim keys to the dummies which will follow animated vertices in your model morphs after attaching, you could do this using 'set key' or again a script to 'bake to anim' in bulk could do it quicker for you.

There are a bunch of different scripts you could try including baking animation to vertex, I would look into baking your animations to the dummies, these can then be added to your bone list in the skin modifier where you can paint weights and re-used for other morph conversions even without a facial bone rig. Or as suggested attached to the existing face rig to drive those bone animations. There are a few ways to do all this and depends on your needs. Sorry I can't be more detailed but hope I have at least helped put you on something of the right track, at least you know it is possible if you want to put the work in.

When I was researching cloth and morph data from modeling app into game engines I never found a single successful method and everyone appeared to just give it up so using this is your only alternative, might seem like a workaround but then so is any method, to me this seemed very simple in the end but took me a long time searching around looking for an 'easier' way to finally come to the conclusion that a 'workaround' would be the only way to do it.
Now that most engines support cloth physics etc it isn't necessary anymore and maybe GG will catch up some day in this respect.

Hmm. if memory serves me correctly, I remember in Classic animation frames 0 - 20 where the phenoms for classic to allow characters to talk. I looked at the butler biped from bond1 and there was two rigs combined to make that work.
The body and the head.

I am not sure that the standard animations include these Game Guru any more.

I need to hunt for a file I have not seen in a while. I will get back to you on this.

Pretty much, but without any kind of built in text to animation assignment they are pretty useless, phonemes might be there but sentences/words wouldn't be baked in but triggered at runtime and I highly doubt you have this at this time in GG (might be wrong but never seen anything pertain to it), perhaps something to add to the voting board...lol.

Edit* should have mentioned, any dummy array should be linked to a parent (head in your case)

All the same as Bugsy says above being able to convert morph animations using dummy arrays to vertex or face link to and convert has a lot of different applications which wouldn't be possible in any game engine otherwise, so worth looking into further for that alone.

Yes it is. X file dont do morph targets at all as far as I have read.
Everything would have to be done in the model program and baked out to X file. A set dialog, and a set frame range for everything that would be said.

Specialty purpose yes, not so easy for GG.

Anyway I am uploading a large file (3dmax file) and it should get you going in the right direction. Slow internet today.

I will send the links in yours (Bugsy and Rolfy) PM

Will probably be a few hours yet.

ah, so there are scripts! that does make it quite easier. If i can get a bake-to-dummies type script, I'll make something and try to use it.

You will find you can't bake morph animations to vertex in Max, probably can't in any modeling app, which would make all this far easier. Which is why you need to use a method of attaching dummy arrays to morphed vertices for transferring animation to your rig. It does sound complicated and I guess it is but once you get it down it all becomes simpler to understand.

Try with something very basic to get started.

I've only recently started doing dialogue synced with ".lip" files in the Creation Kit Engine (from Bethesda). I dont know how they did it ... but they have it where it automatically generators a ".lip" file based on the audio file you put in. The .lip file would generate a stream of animations for the mouth. You can even assign various types of hand gestures and poses for each line of text. So basically you have your characters animations occurring at the same time as his mouth movements. I couldn't imagine how complex things really are behind the hood for that sort of thing to work so well.

I wonder if "Talking NPC / Quest Giver" on the Feature Voting Board is related to this sort of thing? My guess is the intent is just to get audio playing with text present and a basic animation of the player moving his hands around and nodding.

Dang! The engine that made fallout 3 can do that automatically?
and we call THIS the easy game maker

Pretty sure FPSC could do the same thing they all work the same way using text files matching audio, hence the phonemes present in some of the characters animations. Never saw anyone do anything with it though. There were a few character examples in a pack, can't remember which....one was an Einstein style character and a butler character if memory serves....you could always go that road to record your cutscenes if you wanted to try it out

Thank you very much! I will definitely be trying it out.

Right you are! I never really played around with it much though.

Would be nice to have this feature back!

Indeed, this will be a great feature in to GG "Character creator"
With this feature we can make some real dialogue/quests in game, not just sounds and texts...
P.S. I love Fallout 4 facial animation, for example all Magnolia's songs complete animated (facial and corpse)

You could always cheat using crazy talk and cut scenes ..

...from where ?

Crazy Talk 7 is a piece of software that you put a still picture in, mark some points on the face, then add a sound file, it then animates the mouth to move with the sounds, it's really good. the latest version can create 3d head models and much more.

http://crazytalk.reallusion.com/?gclid=CJTXpdi9nNECFe4Q0wodrOMKYg

...I still want to GG make-it animation talk ...Please Santa Lee, do you hear me ?

I feel like the best solution here is just to do a simple "talk" animation (no real lipsync but who cares) that triggers whenever the character emits sound and save facial animation for cutscenes where emotion is really necessary