How would this work best? If you do blend shapes for character customization, will they play well with the blend shapes for face animation? What about the fact that customization blend shapes don’t translate bones, so bone based animation would end up looking weird? Is there any “best way” to approach this?
I already created the same setup and the facial rig works perfectly mixed with additional blend shapes, of course its better to not goo too extreme with the facial customization, otherwise the character will look a bit weird while talking, meaning that if you’re planning to use blend shapes to morph between a realistic character and a cartoony character the facial blend shape rig would probably break on some expressions.
Regarding the blend shapes not moving joints this is good, since you’re changing the character body shape, not its joint structure…there are intersecting issues moslty with Fat characters, because the way the animation is setup the arms will intersect the body, but you could simply set the hands to be far a bit away from the body as soon as that particular animation is triggered…not too elegant and also very time consuming to setup, but unless Epic will create some kind of “proxy capsule” in order for the geometry to avoid intersecting itself ( which will be pretty **** cool ) you have to set those things manually.
In general I prefer using blend shapes, mostly because if you have a character with clothes/armor, you can inherit the blend shapes from the character itself, rather then creating them for each individual part…if you use joints, well, good luck with it 
Hey,
Thanks a lot for the info, it’s been very helpful. Could you elaborate on what you mean by “inherit blend shapes”?