Blend shapes

Question

Ok.. I'll admit...I've not gotten around to submitting an exercise for this... but I have used what I learned on doing a very basic rig on my self portrait character that was at least enough to get me a few expressions. After doing this course, though, I was wondering for a while what shapes and controls I might need if I wanted a more complete set for my character. A couple of months go by, and I found out about ARKit blend shapes, which can be used for mocap and vtuber models, and such. The one thing I noticed, though, is that every single tutorial I've seen on it first have you do a face rig (like from Rigify or some other tool). But I had a question... What was taught in this course should be enough to create such shapes, right? Just curious :D

Answer 1 · 2025-10-13T22:32:43Z

Wayne Dixon replied October 13, 2025 10:32pm

Hi Grady.

I've never done anything with ARKit myself but to answer your question, yes...(*but partially).
The basis of what is needed is 52 blend shapes - with precise names. And that is what is connected to drive the facial capture - in my (limited) understanding.

I believe that there are a few tools out there that will animate your Rigify Face and turn it into the required blend shapes - but a manual approach is certainly possible.

In this course, you learned all the technical things you need to know about shape keys in order to build all the shapes you need.

*What isn't covered though are the exact shape keys you need to work with ARKit. ie - what those 52 shape keys should look like and what they should be called.

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Answer 2 · 2025-10-14T03:30:09Z

replied October 14, 2025 3:30am

Yeah.. I'd already found a site that has the shapes and names. :D I'd just noticed that NONE of the tutorials I'd looked at just used the methods you did to create the shapes... every one of them rigged the face first :D

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