I have completed a realistic character I created from scratch and it's fully rigged except for the face. I've been researching facial animation for a month now and I think I know how I'm going to do it, but I need some advice because it's going to be a crazy workflow.
I'm planning on using a website called Polywink so that they can fully rig my characters face for me which will include all necessary shape keys for clean facial expressions.
The completed file they give to me will be a Maya file and I don't have Maya, but I have a couple of solutions for this. I'm thinking I can download the free trial version of Maya, open this completed file with all the facial shape keys in it, and export this as an FBX, OBJ and any other format I can think of that will be compatible with Blender. If the free trial version of Maya doesn't allow me to export as an FBX, I know I can buy a one month version for $200. Now Blender will be able to open this file. Once I open this file in Blender, I will need to transfer all the shape keys from the version of my character that has them to another version of my character (with hair) that does not have them (The reason for this is that my character's head hair is particle hair that only Blender recognizes.
When I send Polywink my characters' head, it will need to be a version of him that will not include any hair. So I will need to transfer the shape keys from the head with shape keys and without hair to the version of my character that has no head shape keys but it has hair. I hope this makes sense).
According to this post from 2013, it looks like this should be fairly easy in Blender to transfer the shape keys. I'm thinking that I will need to adjust the shape keys around the eyes when my character blinks possibly? I would like to create a very short film with my character talking and sharing his story. I also plan to create a few other male characters using the same head topology so that I can reuse these blend shapes on some other characters I create later.
For the motion capture, I'm planning on using my video camera with motion tracking dots on my face, transfer this to Blender, and retarget this to my characters' face with the "Reface" Blender addon. Does this sound like a realistic workflow? Also, without using the Iphone X with depth information, will the facial animation actually look good if I do it with my Panasonic DMC G6 Cam recorder? I know this is a lot lol but hoping to get some advice for all this. Thanks in advance