Blender Facial Animation to Unity

I’m pretty new to both Blender and Unity. I’ve been following tutorials on how to do facial animations, in particular following Alimayo Arango’s Rig a Cat Tutorial on YouTube. Basically applying bones to shape keys and animating in the Dope Sheet. I’m unsure if this method should work in Unity.

This all seems to be working perfectly in Blender. However as I bring them into Unity, the armatures exist, with the correct amount of frames, however no animation appears to be playing in the preview. I’ve also tried bringing it into my game thinking there may have been a bug in my preview windows but no luck.

I’ve tested my character with a basic animation moving the head as a whole (moving the bone with the whole model, setting parent with automatic weights) and this works in Unity. I think my problem is to do with assigning the bones to the shape keys (as per the above tutorial). Should this method work with Unity, and if so any suggestion on where I could be going wrong? Is there another method you would suggest?

I appreciate any help, and any more information please ask! Thanks

https://forum.unity.com/threads/unity-blend-shapes-can-manage-blender-shape-keys.210828/


Aside from that, you might have to figure out how to bake the bone animation to the actual shape key animation. Not sure how to do that. But I am pretty sure it is possible.

Thanks for pointing me in the right direction, looks like I have some exploring to do in Unity animation!