KeenTools 2021.1 (22 Dec 2020)

Holidays are coming, and here comes our new release. And oh quite a release it is!

Let’s start with simple things, we’ve changed our versioning scheme. This version is 2021.1, which means it’s our first release for 2021 (yeah, who wants 2020 now? ;)

Now to Blender. We brought long awaited built-in FACS blendshapes — now you can animate FaceBuilder heads with 51 of them. And they are ARKit-compatible by the way. That also means you can use Epic Games’ Live Link Face iOS app to record facial animation, export it into a CSV file and load it into our add-on — your FaceBuilder head will be animated with the recorded expressions. This works with iOS devices equipped with the TrueDeph camera, meaning iPhone X and newer models.

More than that, we’ve fixed the symmetry in the head topology and shape, made the neck better, so it’s now easy to attach the head to a body. We’ve also added two useful resolutions: low-poly and mid-poly, while the old one is now called high-poly. You can switch them before and after modelling, grabbing texture and animating without losing anything. We expect low- and mid-poly modes will be especially useful for game development, so we added a special button that sets up the export dialog, so you only need to press the Save button and then load the model in Unreal Engine or Unity. With animation and texture!

Here we come to Nuke, and… let’s perhaps start with the thing that we’ve seen in our mailbox on a daily basis since Nuke Indie was revealed. Yup, KeenTools is now available in Nuke Indie starting from the 12.2v4 version of Nuke.

If you’re still here and want to know more, we’ve got the same FaceBuilder updates as for Blender except the FACS blendshapes story, so it’s better topology (symmetry, neck) and three resolutions you can switch on the fly.

Regarding FACS blendshapes, our FaceTracker node can export a LiveLinkFace-compatible CSV file with all the tracked animation. So it’s now easier to transfer the animation to a different model — just create ARKit-compatible blendshapes and use the CSV file to animate them.

And finally, FaceTracker has got a completely new deformation model, which is much more flexible, natural and supports asymmetrical expressions.

It’s been a difficult year, but now we can finally celebrate it’s last days! And what’s the best way to celebrate something if not to give some support to your community? So here’s your 21% discount coupon for all our licenses: 2021FTW, it works until January 1st 2021.

As always, we’d be excited to know what you think about this release. Please share your thoughts!