Facial Animations not showing up in Unity

Question

I'm pretty new to both Blender and Unity. I've been following tutorials on how to do facial animations, this one in particular: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b8-4IQr6PEg&t=9575s

This all seems to be working perfectly in Blender. However as I bring them into Unity, the armatures exist, with the correct amount of frames, however no animation appears to be playing in the preview. I've also tried bringing it into my game thinking there may have been a bug in my preview windows but no luck.

I've tested my character with a basic animation moving the head as a whole and this works in Unity. I think my problem is to do with assigning the bones to the shape keys (as per the above tutorial). Should this method work with Unity, and if so any suggestion on where I could be going wrong?

I appreciate any help, and any more information please ask! Thanks

Answer 1

Facial animation with combined blendshapes (=shape keys) and bones in a game engine is quite involved. You have to do quite a bit of programming combine those two things.

You can create Blendeshapes and make the animations based purely on those shapekeys directly in Unity. But you can't use bones to drive Blendshapes like you can in Blender. See https://docs.unity3d.com/Manual/BlendShapes.html

Or you can use a bones-only approach for facial animation, that would be the simplest method from a technical perspective, but it can be quite hard to do a good facial rig with only bones.