Less expensive (processing-wise) alternatives to alembic files? Mesh modifiers

Hi,

Looking for solutions to recreate mesh modifiers (found in Maya and Blender) in Unity. It looks like I could build a rig in Maya that uses mesh modifiers and ultimately import the alembic file to Unity so that the animation is identical per vertex. But since alembic files are so much larger than fbx, are there alternative methods to create rigs that allow mesh demformations that Unity will register? One alternative I have seen, but looks quite old and expensive, is the Mega-Fiers asset. Not sure if you effectively work its features into a rig like you can in programs like Maya and Blender. Maybe it could be worked into the Animation Rigging package released last year (

).

I want to be able to animate characters in Unity like shown in this blog post: https://blogs.unity3d.com/2019/06/11/introducing-sherman-part-2/

But it sounds like alembic files would be too expensive computationally. Can this kind of animation be achieved with just blend shapes? Maybe make a script that accesses blend shape values and integrates them with the Animation Rigging package to adjust the mesh procedurally? Thanks for any insight