So I have a character that I've had to tweak the phonemes on, and we have a bunch of previously generated XML files that represent several thousand audio clips I'd love to not have to bring in manually again. How can I bring these into the new actor with the new phonemes? I looked and couldn't find a tutorial...but then again I'm a little bleary eyed, so I apologize if I overlooked something. Thanks in advance!
I'm not really clear about what you mean by an actor's phonemes. An animation has phonemes, but an actor has things like bone poses. I'm assuming you tweaked the actor's bone poses.
If you only change the bone poses, then the curves stored in your existing XML files do not need to be updated. You are just looking for a way to apply those curves onto a new actor with new bone poses, right?
I'm also going to assume you are using the unity XML pipeline here. In that case, the curves aren't applied to the bone poses until they are played in the game. So it is easy to update the bone poses, just import the XML file that contains only the new bone poses onto your FaceFX controller in Unity, overwriting the old bone pose animations.
Alternatively, if you wanted to create a single XML file with your old animations and you new bone poses, you could:
1) Stitch them by hand (not fun, but possible)
2) Load up the XML animation files and export "external animation sets" for each animation group. These will contain only the animation curves you are trying to preserve. Then you can import these animation sets onto your new actor.
3) If you import an XML file that does not contain any face graph nodes, the import process will assume you are trying to import the animations, so it will let you preserve your existing face graph and bone poses while importing the animations in the XML file. So deleting the face graph nodes in your animation XML file could help in a pinch.
Thanks, that answered my question perfectly! My apologies for being a bit unclear and all, but that told me exactly what I needed to know! Much appreciated!