As a Roblox developer, it is currently too hard to do anything related to Facial Animations. This is because we have no access to facial animation data.
If Roblox is able to allow scripts to read FaceControls properties, it would improve my development experience because if I want to make an action happen when the player sticks their tongue out, there is currently no way to trigger this. With the RDC demo of live face tracking, this seems like a very important property to have access to. The properties of FaceControls cannot be read by scripts, and thus cannot be tracked by developers.
This really is the worst thing about facial animations/dynamic heads; I don’t get why scripts can’t change FaceControls properties, limiting how useful these new heads can be! I’ve complained here about this twice, but I can’t find the second post.
In my experience, players that use these new animated heads blink randomly. I would like to make this procedural, where a script would tween the “____EyeClosed” properties to and from 1, but due to this very stupid design decision, I have to play an animation on the highest priority level instead.
(Oh, I just noticed you’re saying scripts should be able to read the values, not write to them. Well, that’s also a dumb decision by Roblox’s devs; I don’t see why these face control properties are off limits from just scripts reading them…)
Writing might be difficult because they are likely assigned to every RenderStepped, so using an animation is probably best for that.
Read permissions should theoretically be a lot simpler!
I think the staff member is saying that adding an API for checking facial expressions is planned, and not write access to the variables like we’d want, unfortunately.
