UE5.0: Facial Control Rig

In order to use both Facial Mocap system and rig controller in Unreal Engine. First, I recommend separate head and body to two different skeletons and skeletal meshes. The reason is simple, Facial animation can be record separately from body mocap. This setup simply gives you whole lot of room to either use the facial mocap data only or with body mocap data. Even you can use existing animation sequence and blend with your new facial animation data. There are other advantages separate head and body or even separate arms, tails, wings etc. These setups can give you further control different parts with each special animation blueprint for automatic work.

Second, the facial asset should keep both blendshapes and rigs i.e. Eyes rig, Mouth rig, rigs for lids, nose , etc. The reason is we're not only use 52 blendshapes to control facial expressions. That would be too limited. If the skeletal mesh contains rigs that would enable us to further edit the expressions with tiny little different change rotation or position of the rig. That create a lot more details.

So, overall, we need:

• Separate Head and Body to 2 different skeletons and skeletal meshes.

• ARKit 52 blendshapes

• Facial rigs

Here is an example using mocap data and add a layer to further control expressions. You can use it as a base animation and then edit the animation or add multiple layers to exaggerate the expressions.