Welcome to the FaceFlex documentation!
👋 Introduction
FaceFlex was built with a simple philosophy: to give control back to the artist.
We don't rely on those ❌ 'one-click' automatic solutions that often fail on stylized or non-humanoid characters.
Instead, our "50% manual, 50% automatic" approach provides you with ✅ reliable results and 🎨 unlimited freedom.
Your job is to creatively rig and pose your character — and FaceFlex’s job is to convert that hard work into perfectly named blendshapes with a single click.
💾 Installation
Starting from Blender 4.2 LTS and above, installing add-ons is smoother than ever.
Just grab the .zip file from your Windows Explorer and drag it straight into the Blender 3D viewport. That’s it 🎯
Still using an older version of Blender? Don’t worry — the solution is simple: Uninstall. 😎
🚀 Getting Started
Once you’ve installed FaceFlex: Open your 3D Viewport in Blender. Press the N key to open the right-hand side panel. Click on the FaceFlex tab.
Inside FaceFlex, you’ll see two main sections:
🧱 Create Shapekeys
This section lets you generate:
- 🧠 61 ARKit blendshapes — for iPhone facial mocap or MetaHuman workflows.
- 🦾 90 Wonder Studio blendshapes — for Wonder Dynamics' Wonder Studio system.
🔗 Link Animation
If you’ve recorded facial animation using the Live Link Face app,
🎯 Export the .csv file and load it here.
FaceFlex will link the animation data to your 3D model —
✨ assuming it already has ARKit-compatible blendshapes.
🧩 How to Start Making Blendshapes on Any Type of Character
This is where most artists go wrong.
They either:
- ❌ Look for tools that do everything automatically (which mostly work only on human-like characters), or
- ❌ Go fully manual — jumping straight into Sculpt Mode and creating shape keys one by one from scratch.
That’s time-consuming, messy, and doesn’t scale well.
That’s why FaceFlex uses a “50% manual, 50% automatic” workflow — and this balance is what makes the process both efficient and flexible.
🔧 50% Manual – The “Secret Sauce”
This gives you full control over your results — no matter how your character looks.
👽 Realistic, stylized, alien, animal... it doesn’t matter.
You can make any face ready for facial mocap if you follow this one trick:
👉 Temporarily rig your character’s face.
Why rig temporarily?
Because it lets you pose expressions faster and more accurately than sculpting everything from scratch.
Once you've posed all the expressions (following ARKit or Wonder Studio standards), FaceFlex can convert those rigged poses into clean shape keys — with just one click.
💥 And the best part?
After generating the shape keys, you can still sculpt in more detail — just make sure to set the shape key value to 1 before sculpting that specific expression.
So you keep full control — without wasting time. ✅
⚡ 50% Automatic – The Time Saver
Let’s say your character’s face is rigged and ready for posing.
💡 Pro tip:
If possible, keep everything (eyes, teeth, tongue, etc.) joined into a single mesh. FaceFlex works with separate meshes too, but a single unified mesh saves time.
📖 Now open the Reference Pose Guide PDF included with FaceFlex. It contains all the ARKit reference poses in the correct order.
Follow these simple steps:
- 🎭 Pose your character in Pose Mode
- 🎞️ Add keyframes on the timeline for each expression
- 🗂️ Use the same pose order as listed in the PDF guide
💡 Pro Tip: Speed up your workflow by mirroring poses!
- 🎯 Suppose you’ve created 7 keyframes for the Left Eye
- 🖱️ Select these 7 keyframes on the Timeline
- 📋 Press Ctrl + C to copy the selected keyframes
- 🎚️ Move the playhead to the 8th frame
- 🔁 Press Ctrl + Shift + V to paste the mirrored poses
✅ Done! The next 7 keyframes will now be mirrored versions for the Right Eye (or opposite side).
🧪 Create Shape Keys with FaceFlex
Now that your character is fully posed:
- 🧬 Duplicate your rigged mesh (The duplicated one will have the shapekeys baked)
- ❌ Remove the Armature modifier from the duplicated mesh
You should now have:
- ✅ A rigged source mesh
- ✅ A non-rigged target mesh (the one we just duplicated)
Then:
- 🪞 In the Source box, select your rigged mesh in the viewport and click the eyedropper icon
- 🎯 In the Target box, add the non-rigged mesh
- 📦 Choose the blendshape type (AR Kit/Wonder Studio)
- 🖱️ DONE! FaceFlex will now copy each posed frame from your rigged model and generate clean, named blendshapes on your target mesh.
🎉 Once this is done, your character is ready for:
- 🎭 Facial mocap
- 🕹️ Real-time animation
- 🛠️ Sculpting final tweaks on top of the base shapes
✅ Test Shape Keys in One Click – Check If Everything’s Set and Ready!
Just select your model in the 3D Viewport and click the Animate button 🎬
🔗 Link Animation – The Fastest Way to Retarget Live Link Face .CSV Data
With your character's ARKit blendshapes set up, it's time to animate them using performance capture data from the Live Link Face app.
1️⃣ Target Objects Box
This is where you tell FaceFlex which mesh to apply the animation to.
- Select your mesh object in the 3D Viewport (the one with ARKit blendshapes).
- Press the ➕ button to add it to the list.
- ➖ removes the selected mesh.
- ❌ clears the entire list.
2️⃣ Load ARKit CSV
Here you’ll import the animation data file:
- Export the .csv file from the Live Link Face app on your iPhone.
- Then, in FaceFlex, use this option to load that file.
3️⃣ Run Process
Now for the final step:
- In the Action box, you can rename the animation clip that will be created in Blender.
- Click Load CSV Animation — and that’s it!
💡 FaceFlex automatically maps the animation data to your blendshapes and syncs it to Blender's timeline — regardless of the FPS used during recording or your current scene settings.
🧠 Your facial mocap data is now applied — ready for rendering, refining, or exporting.
🧼 Reset Shape Key Button
A small thing, but super handy.
Select your mesh with ARKit blendshapes and animation applied — hit the Reset Shape Key button, and it sets all blendshape values to 0 instantly. Great for snapping your face rig back to neutral.
🧠 Pro Tip:
Want to keyframe it? Just enable Auto Keying in Blender and press the button. It’ll key all blendshapes to zero in one click.
