harlynkingm/arkit-pose-recorder-for-blender — explained in plain English
Analysis updated 2026-05-18
Build all 52 ARKit facial blendshapes on a character by posing bones instead of sculpting each shape by hand.
Mirror a saved facial pose from the left side of the face to the right side automatically.
Export saved pose data as a JSON preset and reuse it on other characters sharing the same rig.
Preview an animated reference GIF for each ARKit shape to check the pose is correct.
| harlynkingm/arkit-pose-recorder-for-blender | 0xallam/my-recipe | 0xhassaan/nn-from-scratch | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Stars | 0 | — | 0 |
| Language | Python | Python | Python |
| Last pushed | — | 2022-11-22 | — |
| Maintenance | — | Dormant | — |
| Setup difficulty | easy | moderate | moderate |
| Complexity | 2/5 | 2/5 | 4/5 |
| Audience | designer | general | developer |
Figures from each repo's GitHub metadata at analysis time.
Requires Blender 4.0 or newer, the optional GIF preview needs Pillow installed into Blender's own bundled Python.
This is an addon for Blender, the free 3D modeling program, aimed at people who rig and animate character faces for games or animation. It helps you build the 52 standard ARKit face shapes, the set of facial expressions Apple's face tracking system uses, by posing a character's face bones directly rather than sculpting the mesh by hand for each one. Once you have posed and saved a shape, the addon can bake all of them into real shape keys on the mesh in a single step. The workflow starts by picking the face armature, meaning the bone rig, and the face mesh that will receive the finished shapes. The 52 ARKit shapes then show up automatically in a list inside the addon's panel. For each one, you pose the relevant bones in the viewport by hand and click Save Pose, and only the bones you actually moved get recorded, so you do not need to touch every bone for every shape. A preview button lets you recall a saved pose to check it, and a reset button returns the rig to its resting position without losing any saved data. A useful feature is left and right mirroring. Many face shapes come in pairs, like a smile on the left side and a smile on the right side, and the addon can reflect a saved pose from one side to its counterpart using the bone's own natural orientation rather than a simple flip. Saved pose data can also be exported to a JSON preset file and reused on other characters that share the same rig and bone names, so the work only has to be done once per rig. Each shape's description panel can show an animated reference GIF explaining how that expression should look, though this feature needs the Pillow image library installed into Blender's own bundled Python rather than the regular system Python. Everything else in the addon works without that extra step. The project targets Blender version 4.0 and above and was tested on version 5.1. The author credits an existing VRoid blendshape reference project and a related Google document for background information used in building this addon.
A Blender addon that lets animators build the 52 standard ARKit face expressions by posing bones instead of sculpting, then bakes them into shape keys, with left/right mirroring and reusable presets.
Mainly Python. The stack also includes Python, Blender, Pillow.
The README does not state a license, so usage terms are unclear.
Setup difficulty is rated easy, with roughly 30min to a first successful run.
Mainly designer.
This repo across BitVibe Labs
double-check against the repo, no cap.