Best approach to facial rigging/animation in Unity?

HyperThermal

Hello everyone, I'm currently working on a small project in Blender and Unity. I am currently stuck at rigging the main character. I'm currently trying to use a mixture of Rigify mixed with purely bone driven facial animation. A lot of resources I've found online, however, utilize blend/shape keys. Which method should I go with?

SoulReaverFo

Bone driven animation is a lot faster performance wise, it only depends on your current project. If all time you will see the face of your character and the character performance needs to be top notch then the hybrid approach of using blends shapes might give you the flexibility, but the drawback is this: more errors are likely to happen.

Richard Kain

It depends on the importance of facial animation to your current project. You should go with the method that will fit your project the best.

Bones will give you better performance in terms of rendering speed, and will allow for overall smaller 3D files. But they will also require significantly more complicated setup, especially to get really high-quality facial animation.

If you need your characters to talk, check out Cheshire Lip-Sync. (shameless plug) It uses shape keys for 3D models, but it is a great way to get some lip-sync animation into your project quickly.