Facial Animation - best way?

Hello! I am getting ready to start a project that will be delivered in Unity. It's a serious game project and it's going to push the capabilities to its' limit. We are going to have a lot of character animation which is going to be captured in Arena, cleaned up in MotionBuilder and exported to Unity. This is an easy part. The other part that I am concerned with is Facial Animation. Originally we wanted to use OptiTrack to capture facial expression. But as I understand (please, correct me if I am wrong) OptiTrack will animate vertices and vertices animation is not supported by Unity? So, we will have to rig the face - and I am not sure if OptiTrack would work with bones? I have been looking at Mega-Fires and maybe it's the way to go. So, what I am asking is... what is the best way to go about facial animation in Unity? Thank you!

 

Morph maps are probably a decent way to go. The megafiers thing should work with that. It probably isn't too hard to write up your own system, either.

 

Morphs will give you the finest control of the face animations, you can do it with bones but depending of the complexity and subtlety of the animation you need the number of bones could get high. Morphs work great for faces and if you get a good morphing system such as MegaFiers that only morphs the required number of vertices and has support for multiple targets per channels for even more complex animations as well bezier interpolation and a multi threaded core then I think you will have all you need, and things get even easier if you use Max as it comes with the exporter. I use the system and it is by far the best purchase I have made on the asset store and if you read the reviews you will see many more who say the same
Mike

 

If its a serious project and you can give me proof, I assist you guys with my MorphGen.
At the moment I'm hardcore programming on a solution for Animation&Morphing&Skinning inside Unity, so my time for actual modelling is short. The deal, you guys test my MorphGen, help me to improve it (i like/don't like....etc.) and I can use your project as reference/ advertisement for my project, and I give you a copy of MorphGen and allow you to use it.

phoenixthedevelop@yahoo.de

 

I use joints as they are extremely cheap. A little time consuming on the rigging and setup, but if you model the heads correctly you can share facial skeleton systems (we did it on an unannounced FPS before our studio closed... and it was LOD-able)

 

There are some morph plugins available on the asset store, though I have not tried them, they look easy to use.