is there a cheaper way of doing facial animation instead of spending a $1000+ on an Iphone 11?
borrowing the iPhone 11?
Aside from that. Very much yes.
if you are willing to put in around 30 hours to get everything ready.
Rigify offers the rig base for a face in blender.
extract that and adjust in edit mode to fit it to your characters face maintining a more or less accucare facial position.
Weight color the bones so that the face can be animated ‐ Auto paint may not cut it.
Film yourself with some sort of dots in more or less the same places the bones are centered to affect.
In blender you can then process the video with the dots to extract animation tracks for the bones to follow.
If you do this with 2 cameras you can get better 3D effect.
overall.
Usually, the Z height is just “guessed” or left as is, and only the X/Y of each bone are actually parsed.
All of that is generally enough to get a character talking, winking, or doing basic stuff - even by hand.
Obviously you won’t necessarily be able to do complex things like the DigitalHuman stuff without proper footage from all axis. And the iPhone faceAR won’t either.
The main difference is that instead of morphs you’ll need bones on your character to pass in the animation to unreal.
Additionally, if you couple morphs to the bones, with some complex woek of art process, you can get some very realistic facial animations to just happen when moving a couple bones around.
the faceAr does offer info on its morph targets/shape keys.
they aren’t the easiest to create - and they really aren’t standard. Each face should have their own customized ones…