How to get started with facial animations?

Well if you are looking for a resource to play with the Genesis series that comes with Daz Studio is a good choice as the base rig supports both Morph and Cluster facial animation and all ready rigged as to the necessary facial joints.

The hard part is in the set up as it’s a more of a learn by exploration kind of process as the final result will depend more on the type of project you are working on but included is a rather steep learning curve and with a ready to use resource like Genesis you can get right into the required process. Not to worry though it’s one of those things that hard until it because easy

Note: Cluster s is a rigging thing so it’s ready to go as to that need but usually you will need to purchase the shapes if you want to go the morph direction as you can get into thousands of different shapes for a single character.

What you need.

First UE4 does not have the means of directly creating dialogue takes so you will need some way to author the animations be it clusters or morphs.

Morph targets are easy as they are additive where with clusters you can animate using transforms just as you would a run cycle but for it to work in combination as an additive to a action state you will need to layer the animations.

First things first though using Daz Studio and Genesis, I would recommend Genesis 3 as it’s best suited for video game use, do some basic "make it move " animations using DS, including facial animation using clusters, and export the package to figure out the set up in UE4.

This is how I started one step at a time