Hey everyone,
I’m currently working on a real-time conversational AI avatar project. For this to work, I needed MetaHuman heads with the standard 52 Apple ARKit blendshapes so the mouth and face can animate smoothly in real time.
If you’ve ever tried exporting a MetaHuman from Unreal Engine, you probably know the frustration: the skin, eyes, and teeth are all fused into one mesh, hair and beards aren’t exported at all, and the teeth stay shut when the mouth opens.
I searched everywhere for a simple, affordable tool that just exports MetaHumans with working blendshapes, but couldn't find anything. Manually adjusting the rigs and sculpting 52 blendshapes by hand for every character was not an option for me.
So I decided to build an Unreal Engine plugin myself. After a lot of trial and error, it's finally working. With one click, it exports the head into a clean FBX file:
- Head, eyes, teeth, eyelashes, and beard are cleanly separated
- The teeth actually open naturally with the jaw
- Beards and hair are included and move with facial expressions
- All 52 standard Apple ARKit blendshapes are ready to use
- Textures are exported automatically
I packaged it into an Unreal plugin called FaceForge 52 (supporting UE 5.7 & 5.8). I put together a full video tutorial showing the export process and testing it in Blender:
YouTube Tutorial & Demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnydqQhIfZ4
Hope this helps anyone who has been struggling with the same MetaHuman export issues. Let me know what you think or if you have any questions!