idle face animations without ARkit
Ok, well it’s not that it’s impossible to not use morphs and all of that.
And it’s not like you need collision or anything which keeps you from using a shader.
So, here’s a video on how to animate mesh vertex from a texture:
From there, extrapolate what you’d need to make a face animate by feeding in a texture.
Stuff like PivotPainter can help generating the textures of an animated face in maya for instance, so it’s not impossible to get this working without morphs/bones.
The idea behind not using either is the performance gain.
Let’s be honest. Metahumans are cinematic only trash.
Adding 32 plus bones to your character(s) for face motion makes even standard skeletons extra bulky/costly to render.
If your game project needs something like a moving crowd, and you are budget constrained, then an animated shader is the way to go…