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If you have multiple characters in your project that are similar and share the same Skeleton Asset, you may want to consider using curve driven animations for facial expressions. When doing so, you can share thoseanimation curves and drive them with Pose Assets to produce your desired facial expressions and even share them across multiple Skeletal Meshes. 

One important caveat however is that your animation must not have any bone transform data within it. Any bone transform data, even with one mesh's reference pose, won't work for other meshes so it is important to remove bone transforms (keeping only curves) and start with each mesh's own reference pose if you want to share the curve between different meshes. This enables you to share the facial curves between different faces. 

The first thing you will want to do is to import a base Skeletal Mesh and create a Skeleton Asset that will be considered as your Master Skeleton (which every other Skeletal Mesh that you want to share facial animations with will use). Any additional meshes that you import should have the same bone hierarchy and naming convention in order to share the Skeleton asset.

Animation Blueprint Blend Nodes In Unreal Engine

The next thing you will want to do is inside your DCC,  bake out your poses to an FBX sequence and import the FBX into UE4. This will give you an Animation Sequence containing each of the curves at their min/max blend values. 

Once you have imported your sequence containing all your curve data, you can create a Pose Asset  from that animation sequence which can be used to translate the animation curve data into actual facial animation on the character. 

Inside your Pose Asset, you will need to define the Pose Names by entering in each name manually or by copying and pasting data stored from your clipboard. 

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Here we have a list of all the poses identified in our 58 frame animation sequence containing our poses that we imported: 

Every character that uses the Master Skeleton would then have access to these curves and can drive their own facial animation by the different values represented in each curve while the Pose Asset translates all of the curve data to the actual animation pose the character takes. 

When entering your Pose Names inside the Pose Asset, it is generally a good idea to delete unused curves from the Anim Curves window to minimize the amount of unused curves from being displayed.

Master Sequences, Shots, And Takes

Below in our Pose Asset we can see all of our Pose Names which are also displayed in the Anim Curves window:

When we change Pose_0 to l_eye, Pose_0 remains as a curve in the Anim Curves which we can delete by right-clicking on it and selecting Delete Curve.

Once you have a Pose Asset, you'll want to create an Animation Blueprint for your character that utilizes a curve driven animation, and finally, a Pose Asset node (assigning your Pose Asset) to correctly translate the curve data into poses the character can use. 

Anim Preview Editor

If you plug the curve driven animation directly into the Final Animation Pose, the Animation Pose will not now how to translate the curves into pose data. This is where the Pose Asset node comes in and intercepts the animation, properly translating the curves into actual pose data that the character can use. 

When you have additional characters, if you create and assign them Child Animation Blueprints from this Master Animation Blueprint, you can override the Pose Asset with unique Pose Asset data for each character. This allows for the character specific deltas to be achieved, ensuring that a scream for example looks correct on varying proportions. 

Inside our Child AnimBP, we have overridden the Pose Asset to use one that is specific to this character, enabling us to use the deltas to drive facial poses specific to this character and the animation that is played comes from our parent.

Sequencer Quick Start

When you start to bring in facial animations for your characters, typically you'll want some body animation that is driven by bones in the character in addition to the curve driven facial animation. In order to share body animations but drive facial animations through curves, you will need to remove any Bone Tracks from the facial animation leaving only curves or use an Animation Modifier to remove specified Bone Tracks and drive curves for the face. 

Our Animation Sequence contains all the curves and keyed values for those curves representing varying facial poses. The problem however is that the curves would also be playing on top of any bone driven animations which would result in double transforms and incorrect results. In this case you would want to remove those Bone Transforms, leaving only the curves. 

You can also use Animation Modifiers to remove certain bones only if you want to share body animations but drive curves for the face. Typically you'll want to have a bone driven body animation, but curve driven facial animations in which case we opted to use an Animation Modifier. 

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On any animation that your import, you can go into the Animation Modifiers section and then apply the Animation Modifier that you have created to remove Bone Transforms. 

With only the curves remaining, you can run the animation through a Pose Asset inside your Animation Blueprint to give you the curve driven pose that can be shared. Below, we connect our curve driven animation directly up to the Final Animation Pose, however the pose is not used as it does not know how to handle the curves. We then connect it to the Pose Asset to drive those curves which results in the character performing our facial expressions. 

Each of our characters since they are using a Child Animation Blueprint and their own assigned Pose Asset can now share the facial animation using their relative deltas. Since we do not have bone transforms and the animation is purely driven by curves, we are not seeing double transforms and can blend this with any additional bone driven animation data (such as full body animation). Character animations in Unreal Engine are built on the foundation of a Skeletal Mesh, a rigged mesh that can be manipulated to create animations. In addition, Animation Blueprints can be augmented to Skeletal Meshes to apply logic that governs animation behavior and interactions within levels.

Animating With Control Rig In Unreal Engine

Unreal Engine provides a variety of animation tools to work with Skeletal Meshes to further enhance your animations. This page provides an overview of these primary systems.

Here you will find information about the Animation Editors in Unreal Engine, such as the Skeleton Editor, the Animation Sequence Editor, and the Skeletal Mesh Editor.

In Unreal Engine, Animation Blueprints are a powerful and versatile system that provides you with the ability to visually script your animation behavior. With Animation Blueprints, you can control animation blending, script interactions, and create other procedural behaviors.

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Blend Spaces Blend Spaces are graphs where you can plot any number of animations to be blended between based on the values of multiple inputs.

Blend Spaces are graphs where you can plot any number of animations to be blended between based on the values of multiple inputs.

Animation Montage Animation Montages are animation assets that enable you to combine animations in a single asset and control playback using Blueprints.

Animation Sequence Editor In Unreal Engine

The pages below will help you set up and operate Live Link, a tool for real-time streaming of animation data from external DCC environments.

Live Link FreeD Add tracking and camera data through Live Link with the FreeD protocol, commonly used for camera tracking and Pan, Tilt, Zoom (PTZ) cameras.

Add tracking and camera data through Live Link with the FreeD protocol, commonly used for camera tracking and Pan, Tilt, Zoom (PTZ) cameras.

Animation Not Playing Properly

Live Link Curve Debugger Using the Live Link Curve Debugger, you can quickly see what the output is of various Live Link curves are in an easy to debug manner.

Using the Live Link Curve Debugger, you can quickly see what the output is of various Live Link curves are in an easy to debug manner.

Here you can find workflow shortcuts, tips, and console commands to foster more efficient and productive techniques when utilizing the many animation tools Unreal Engine has to offer.

Unreal Engine 4.17 Release Notes