Problem rigging with automatic weights and shape keys for Unity

Question

Greetings nice community! I'm having problems rigging my character (a simple panda), probably because it's the first time I actually try to rig something. Anyway I got to the point where I made the rig using Mixamo, did a separate rig for the eyes and set up shape keys for the mouth and the blink animation. I want to use the animations from mixamo in my Unity project and I was hoping I can keep the eyes rig separate so the animations would have no problem working with that mesh, but the eyes rig doesn't work in Unity for some reason.

I tried clearing the auto weights and joining the rigs together and then parenting the whole model to the combined rig,but got wicked mesh deforms.

My questions is what is the right path to follow from the point that I reached and what I'm doing wrong? Should I make bones for the shape keys first? Should I even join the separate rigs into one? And I also tried using preserve volume in the modifiers tab but the animations work perfect only in Blender - when I get them to unity I get slight but noticeable mesh deforms.

I'm uploading a cleaned version of my .blend file with the modifiers not applied and the rigs not parented hoping someone would show me the right way. Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

Have you tried using a Driver for that?

• Add a bone to your armature that will be your Driver, it works similar to an IK bone, as in, it doesn't affect the mesh directly.
• Select the shapekey you want to add the driver to, click with the right mouse button on the bar below and select Add Driver, it shall turn purple.
• Then on the Graph editor window, where it says F-Curve, change it to Drivers. Click on "Key", there you can select each shapekey that will be controlled by the Driver.
• Expand the right panel, there you can select the bone that will control the shapekey, a.k.a. the Driver.
• One detail though, On the right panel where it says Type, change it to Average Value, then moving the bone will change the values on the shapekey.

There rest is up to your preferences.

Hope it helped.